oo 



W^t ^emt'Centenntal ^nnibersarp 



OF THE FOUNDING OP THE 



UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER 




1900 



ADDRESSES 



AT 



Cjje ^emt^centennial ^nnibersarp 



OP THE FOUNDING OF THE 



UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER 




JUNE TENTH TO FOURTEENTH 
MOM 









E. R. A>~DREV,s Prtstisg Co. 
Rochester, X. T. 
'' 1901 



IN EXCHANCK 



U 



ANNUAL COMMENCEMENT 

AND 

SEMI-CElsTTENI^IAL OELEBRATIOI^ 

1900 



Sunday, June loth. 

10:30 a. m., at the First Baptist Church. 

Anniversary Sermon: The Permanent Influence of Sacrifice. 
Eev. Thomas Edwin Brown, D. D., Franklin, Pa. 

Monday, June nth. 

11:00 a. m., at the Gymnasium. 

Dedication of the Alumni Gymnasium. Address by Professor 
Alonzo Stagg, of the University of Chicago. 

4:00 p. m., at the Gymnasium. 

Class Day Exercises. 
8:00 p. m., at the Gymnasium. 

Dewey Prize Declamations, by members of the Sophomore Class. 

Tuesday, June I2th. 

9:00 a. m., at Anderson Hall. 

Examinations for Admission to the University. 

10:00 a. m., at Anderson Hall. 

Annual Meeting of the Board of Trustees. 
1:00 p. m., at the Gymnasium. 

The Students' Dinner. 
2:00 p. m., at the Monroe County Court House. 

Business Meeting of the Alumni. 
4:00 p. m., at the Monroe County Coui-t House. 

Business Meeting of the Phi Beta Kappa. 



4 SEMI-CENTENNIAL CELEBEATION 

8: 00 p. m., at the Lycetun Theatre. 

Oration before the AiiUatsT: Personality in Politics. 

Hon. MerriU Edwards Gates, Ph. D., LL. D., L. H. D., '70, 
Washington, D. C. 

9:30 p. m., at the Gymnasium. 

Social Gathering of the AiiiJM>'i. 

Wednesday, June 13th. 

SEMI-CENTENNIAL DAY 

10:00 a. m., at the Lyceum Theatre. 

Morning Exercises 

Edward Mott Moore, M. D., LL. D., 

President of the Board of Trustees of the University, 
presiding. 

arrsic 

Prater, Eev. Joseph W. A. Stewart, D. D., Pastor of the First 
Baptist Church of Rochester. 

music 

Address of Welcome, Professor Henry Fairfield Burton, Acting 
President of the University. 

Address: The University of Rochester iu its Relation to Educa- 
tional Progress during the Last Fifty Years. 
Professor William Carey Morey, Ph. D., '68, of the University 

of Rochester. 

The College Song: **The Genesee." 

The Students of the University, led by the College Glee Club. 
Address: The Past and the Future of the University in America. 

Hon. William Torrey Harris, Ph. D., LL. D., United States 
Commissioner of Education. 

MUSIO 

8:00 p. m., at the Lyceum Theatre. 

Evening Exercises 

Hon. David Jayne Hill, LL. D., 

Assistant Secretary of State of the United States, 

presiding. 



GENERAL PKOGBAMME 



MUSIC 



Pbayeb, Rev. Nelson Millard, D. D., Pastor of the First Presby- 
terian Church of Rochester. 

MUSIC 

Opening Address, by the presiding officer. 
Address: Promise and Performance. 

His Excellency Theodore Roosevelt, LL. D., Governor of the 
State of New York. 

Song: ** The Stars and Stripes," - The College Glee Club. 
Address: College Types and Traditions. 

Professor Newton Lloyd Andrews, Ph. D., LL. D., of Colgate 
University. 

Address: The Founders of the University and the University 
They Founded. 
Rev. Robert Stuart MacArthur, D. D., LL. B., '67, New York 
City. 

Song: "Alma Mater," - - - The College Glee Club. 
Address: The College and the City. 

Hon. George Alexander Carnahan, Mayor of the City of 
Rochester. 

Address: The Alumni and their Alma Mater. 

Hon. Jacob Sloat Fassett, '75, Elmira, New York. 

MUSIC 

Thursday, June 14th. 

COMMENCEMENT DAY 

9:30 a. m., at the Lyceum Theatre. 

Orations by Members op the Graduating Class. Conferring 
OF Degrees. Award of Prizes and Honors. 

1:00 p. m., at the Gymnasium. 

The Alumni Dinner. Five Minute Speeches by 

Rev. Henry Lyman Morehouse, D. D., '58, President of the 
Associated Alumni. 

Professor Rush Rhees, LL. D., President-elect of the Uni- 
versity. 



SEMI-CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION 

Rev. Augustus Hopkins Strong, D. D., LL. D., President of 
the Rochester Theological Seminary. 

Albert Hall Harris, Esq. , '81 , Member of the Board of Trustees. 

Rev. Robert Ellis Jones, S. T. D., President of Hobart College. 

Hon. Pliny T. Sexton, Regent of the University of the State of 
New York. 

Professor Albert Harrison Mixer, LL. D., of the University. 

Rev. Andrew Longyear Freeman, *51, Canandaigua, N. Y. 

Hon. Willis Seaver Paine, LL. D., '68, New York City. 

Adelbert Frank Jenks, Esq., '75, Jamestown, N. Y. 

Professor Francis Willey Kelsey, Ph. D., '80, of the Univer- 
sity of Michigan. 

Hon. James M. Early O'Grady, '85, Member of Congress from 
the Rochester District. 

Hon. David Jayne Hill, LL. D., Ex-president of the Uni- 
versity. 

8:00 p. m., at Powers Hall. 

The President's Reception. 



ANNIYEKSARY SERMOISr* 
The Permanent Influence of Sacrifice 

Eev. Thomas Edwin Brown, D. D. 

" For David, after he had served his own generation by the will of God, fell on 
iSleep." Acts 13: 36. 

CoTTiTn unities, institutions, men, have a right to be judged at 
their best. So this apostolic epitaph-writer judged David. He 
might have seized upon a flaw or failing, some defect of will, 
some taint of blood. But, as inspired by Ilim who knows all 
history and its laws of motive and movement in character and 
-conduct, he the rather gives us the sweep and set of the vast 
<ientral current of the man's life, in the single stroke of this 
simple but splendid panegyric. 

We are sure the use of these words to-day is justified in the 
-career of the University whose fifty fruitful years now lie be- 
hind us. For the words embalm a memory. This occasion is 
not indeed funereal but festival. The University is alive, never 
so much as now. She is hardly in her prime, certainly not 
at the crest of her progress. She stands to-day with the added 
vigor and alertness of all the added years. But the years have 
gone. Fifty pages of the life-history have been written up, and 
you cannot erase one line or letter of the Avriting. We may 
well take, therefore, not sad indeed but serious advantage of the 
pause of this jubilee time to question the history and ask what 
it is worth. The words of our text give the answer. For they 
•embody an ideal even as they embalm a memory. They are a 
measure for our judgment on the past, since they are the inspira- 
tion, the law for our living in the present. 

Only that which serves is ever truly great or permanently in- 
fluential. David served. Christ said: "He that will be chief 

*An abstract furnished by Dr. Brown. 



8 INFLUENCE OF SACRIFICE 

among you let him be your minister." But centuries before- 
the Christ had said it, this kingly ancestor of the Christ had. 
tried to live it. Christ did not invent this law nor discover it.. 
It was in the nature of things. It was in the character of God. 
Christ only most clearly defined it, and of all men before or 
since most luminously and conqueringly illustrated it. 

Another element of permanent influence is timeliness in serv- 
ice. "America," says some one, "is opportunity writ large." 
So is our century. So has been every century, every era, every 
year of the world's history to the people who were making the 
history. David served his own generation. The sign of 
David's wisdom, his heroism, his power, was that he could trans- 
late occasion into achievement. The past is not dead except 
that it is beyond our power to recall or re-live it. The past lives.. 
Its influence lives. We are history embodied. The wise serv- 
ant will look before as well as after. He is to transmit as well 
as to inherit and use. Israel's prophets were futurists as they 
were statesmen. They were statesmen so practical because they 
were seers so keen-visioned. But life is not in groping amid the 
dry bones of the past, masquerading in the moth-eaten garments- 
of our grandfathers, nor yet in idly dreaming of the future. If 
history can give us inspiration for duty, and light the path of to- 
day by the lamp of experience, let us study history. Unused 
power is lost power. We reach the future only through the* 
present. The men who speak most clearly to us out of the past 
are men who spoke most serviceably to the ears of their own con- 
temporaries. This is our time. Here are our battlefields, our 
workshops, our opportunities. Xot yesterday but to-day. Not 
to-morrow but to-day. We breathe the air of to-day. Its blood' 
is in our veins. Its duties are our tasks. Its characteristic- 
genius must be our inspiration. 

Another element in permanent influence is the courageous^ 
freedom of the servant. David served his generation according 
to the will of God. He served not as a slave but as a king^ 
He was free to choose the time, place, measure of the service. 
And the man who serves truly his generation is no man's serv- 
ant, though he serves men. He is God's servant. He seeks to- 



THOMAS EDWIN BROWN 9 

discover God's will, and to work out, if he may, in God's name^ 
at God's behest, bj God's help, for man's good, the sacred tasks 
of to-day. The age, the community, the church, the college,, 
must bid their servants be free. It is pitiful when it is other- 
wise. It is pitiful when an age treats its leaders, its most capa- 
ble servants acting in the realms of most responsible and in- 
tricate service, as if they were children needing swaddling 
bands, or serfs needing shackles to keep them from straying, or 
scourges to whip them to their tasks. It is a shame if the tyrant 
shall be a venal public press. It is a shame if the tyrant shall 
be an ignorant, fanatical pietism. It is a crime beyond measure 
if the money power shall become the tyrant, seeking by bribe or 
threat to entangle again in yokes of bondage free thought and 
free speech in editorial sanctum or college chair or Christian pul- 
pit or any sphere of highest service wherein God's providence,, 
as revealed in history and in human need, has set men free- 
What was said, in a recent discussion, of the college, is true of 
every institution which aims at truth and character for the sake 
of service ; "The life blood of a college is not money, but lib- 
erty." 

Has the University of Eochester in any measure realized this 
ideal? Have the years been characterized by service timely 
and free ? A few weeks ago, as I held in my hand the invita- 
tion of your president to this grateful task, I had at once a 
vision. For as in the same breath you instinctively mention 
Eugby and Arnold, Balliol and Jowett, Williams and Mark 
Hopkins, Brown and Wayland, so you instinctively think of 
Rochester and Anderson. For nearly thirty years it was essen- 
tially his college. He came to it to find it a child. He left it 
a man. He found it brick ; he left it marble. In that vision 
I saw him as I had known him for those more than twelve happy 
years wherein his pure, strong heart beat cheer, courage, guid- 
ance, sympathy, close against mine. I saw him, great teacher, 
great administrator, great leader, great friend and counsellor^ 
great father of all his boys, but in all these and greatest of all, 
great servant of God and the college, of his coimtry and his kind. 
The scholar-servant he was. A colleague said of him: "The 



10 INFLUENCE OF SACRIFICE 

filial purpose of all his attainments and all his abilities as a 
scholar was to serve his fellows." The principle of service was 
the centre and substance of his ethical teaching. He saw it as 
the glory of the life of Jesus and the flower and fruit of practi- 
cal Christianity. This was the rule by which he measured the 
men and the events of history. Goethe's transcendant genius 
had no attraction for him, because tested by this standard 
Ooethe had no patriotism, no sympathy with his own age or 
time, a man almost willing to devour the whole world, if he could 
only digest it, and so add to his own growth. The ideal toward 
which his temper, thought, and action were constantly reaching 
was that he might be among men as one that served. President 
Anderson seiwed his times. He served with freedom. He served 
with religious devotion as doing the will of God. He served by 
touching with his own temper, kindling with his own passion, 
ennobling with his own devotion men of every possible rank and 
calling in life, in whom his counsels and examples have become 
guiding principles never to be forgotten. The spirit of service 
poured through his eyes. It streamed from his features. It 
modulated his voice. It swung with his arm. It strode majes- 
tically in his gait. It emphasized his thought, and energized all 
his expression. And it moved out from his great nature to 
transform other natures, in proportion to their capacity, into 
his own likeness. So he laid the foundation and in part reared 
the walls of your college with the indestructible material of the 
mind to serve. 

The University has shown the opportuneness and the freedom 
of the spirit of service which was built into her foundations, in 
that she has moved with the progress of the years. Many, many 
things have changed. Xew studies, new methods, new forms of 
truth, new ideals of religious character and expression of 
Christ's life have come ; some of them to stay, some to change 
into new and higher forms. There has l^een freedom for con- 
science here, as became an institution founded by Baptists. 
Protestant, Romanist, Israelite, and Agnostic have wrought side 
by side upon the structure of personal intelligence and good 
character. And though there has been change and progress, be- 



THOMAS EDWIN BROWN 11 

cause you have dared to be free as serving the will of God, you 
liave sometimes refused to change. You have dared to be your 
own judge of the fitting service. You have dared to sta^d for 
broadest culture of mind and heart, rather than for any narrow 
specialism of brain or hand. 

Fifty years of service ! Fifty years of progress ! What are 
they worth ? What have they wrought ? By their fruits we 
must know them. The University has sent forth her sons to 
every field of human endeavor. In the pulpit, at the bar, in the 
sick room, in the teacher's chair, at the forge, in the counting- 
room, on the farm and in the factory, in the editor's sanctum, in 
the statesman's cabinet and on the tented field, they have found 
their place and done their tasks. Some of them have wrought 
so nobly, at tasks so large, that they will receive special and fit- 
ting meed of honor amid these commemoration days. And they 
have had such temper of service, such readiness to bring things 
to pass, both in the realm of character and achievement, they 
have so faithfully toiled for good citizenship, wholesome litera- 
ture, honest business. Christlike living, — the ideals that redeem 
life from sordidness, — that their voices unconsciously blend in 
the panegyric we pronounce upon their Alma Mater: — 
^^Through fifty years she has well and truly served her genera- 
tion according to the will of God." 



OKATIO^^ BEFOEE THE ALUMNP 
Personality in Politics 

Hon. Mebbtll Edwabds Gates, LL. D., L. H. D. 
SlGI^IFICAl^^CE OF A2s" AnKTVERSAEY. 

Perhaps the finest value in the observance of an anniversary- 
is this, that it helps ns to see the ideal in our daily sur- 
roundings and relations. A new light falls on our familiar 
past. We step aside from the daily path for a point of view ;. 
and there comes to us a fresh sense of the beauty, the sweetness, 
the fine possibilities, in the associations and the persons to whose 
true significance we have been blinded by custom and proxim- 

'^Miat father has not seen a new radiance of spiritual beauty 
in the maidenly face of his daughter, when her birthday re- 
minded him that she was now 

''Standing with reluctant feet 
^^^le^e the brook and river meet, 
Womanhood and childhood fleet?" 

However faithfully the husband cherishes the wife whose 
presence at his side sweetens life and continually strengthens 
his heart for life's labors, there is a new, an added sense of her 
worth and preciousness when the anniversary of their wedding 
day comes round, and all their past love and their united expe- 
rience of life like an Indian-summer haze, lends a calm beauty 
to her face that transfigures the time-touched features and is 
more calmly satisfying than the remembered beauty of her 
spring-time, as he looks into 

"A beauteous face, in which there meet 
Fair records, promises as sweet." 

And so the keener sense of hurrying time and rapid change 
which a father's or a mother's birthday will suggest to loving 

•The oration before the Alumni is included in this volume through the 
courtesy of the Associated Alumni, at whose request it is furnished for 
publication by Dr. Gates. 



MERRILL EDWARDS GATES 13 

children often flashes into the consciousness a truer vision of the 
essential nature of parenthood, a stronger emotion of filial love, 
and a finer appreciation of filial duties. 

As time hurries us on in the journey of life, on anniversary 
days such as this, on those halts and camping grounds on points 
of vantage where the view over the stages we have traveled in 
the past is clear, and memory is vivid, there come to us our tru- 
est thoughts of what has heen, our clearest visions of what ought 
to be, and our deepest sense of privilege and blessing in what is, 
as we see it in its true relations. For "the actual, well seen, is 
the ideal." 

We prolong our life in Institutions. 

But when such anniversaries occur in the life of a person, 
however pleasant the surroundings, however happy the circum- 
stances, there is always a touch of pain in the heart. We do not 
speak of it ; but it is there. After the early spring days of per- 
petual hope and careless joy are passed, there is a secret pang 
for every loving heart in the anniversary of a friend's birth — a 
pang that comes from the ever-present knowledge that each 
quick-returning anniversary brings one year nearer the time 
when that life will have ceased among us. This is the reason 
why in some families where love is deepest, such anniversaries 
bring more of pain than pleasure. The life of a friend is so 
short! The strongest man, the dearest, most gracious woman, 
so soon comes to the allotted end of life, that on anniversary days 
the sweetness of the present love is always shadowed by the ap- 
prehension of the coming loss. 

But the anniversary of a self -perpetuating institution like 
that which we honor to-night, has in it no such haunting sugges- 
tion of pain. As we go on in life, and feel how short is any 
man's lease of power, do we not feel a growing satisfaction in 
the life we have in common in institutions which endure from 
generation to generation ? 

When a young man first feels the zest of living, he is pro- 
foundly impressed by the importance of a man's life to himself. 
His own needs, his own desires, the development of his o^^^l pow- 
ers to the full in every direction — these seem to him enough. 



14 PEESONALirr IS POLITICS 

But a few years, bringing him on toward middle life, change 
all this. Scarcely has he seen clearly the ends which he wishes 
to attain, scarcely has he nerved his heart and braced his will 
for the contest, when there falls on him like a shadow the con- 
sciousness of the brevity of life. If he has fixed his eye on any- 
thing really worth attaining, when life takes him sternly in 
hand with its interposed obstacles, its checks and counter-checks^ 
its absolute denials, and ruthless wrenching losses, he comes to 
feel keenly the frailty of his own imaided grasp upon affairs, 
the slender import of any man's life lived and regarded as a 
thing by itself. He feels the need of allying his life and work 
with the life and work of others whose aims and efforts coincide 
with his own. He feels the wish to make his span of life attain 
to permanence — endure — ^by allying it with institutions which 
abide, by using it to perpetuate a work which others have begun, 
and which still others will carry on when he has passed away. 
Xor is this desire the refuge of weak wills. The strongest souls 
— wills fullest charged with the impulse to do and to control — 
feel the most imperious demand for means and men and minds 
to be so used by them as to perpetuate in institutions their own 
ideas, that their life-work may not come to naught. Through 
an alliance with institutions, in one form or another, every ear- 
nest and aspiring soul seeks to escape its body's doom of but a 
few days' existence here, and to perpetuate its influence when 
the right arm is palsied and the valid eye has lost its compelling 
power. 

There is reason, then, in the nature of man for such love of 
an institution as binds us together tonight. And when an en- 
tire community is united to do honor to an institution of learn- 
ing which has lived for half a century and gives promise of a 
most vigorous life in the future, there is reason for the feeling of 
pleasure and hopefulness which fills the air. 

The City is eendeeed secuee of Fa^vie by the TJxiveesity. 
For the residents of this fair City of Flowers who have no 
closer tie with the University than is involved in a common 
citizenship and common interest in all that makes for the fair 
fame and the well-being of the city, this anniversarv throws new 



MERRILL EDWARDS GATES 15 

light upon the common interests of city and college. The city 
honors the college, and the college reflects fresh honor upon the 
city. 

For there is a monotony of mediocre comfort and prosperity 
in our American towns. One who has travelled widely through 
our dear land cannot resist the conviction that this is the fact — 
that the very uniformity of average well-being, which in one 
sense is our pride, nevertheless makes it difficult to charac- 
terize our towns as interesting, or as differing one from another. 
Variety of business interests and of manufactures does not sat- 
isfy the wish for something distinctive and to the non-resident 
noteworthy, in the prosperous towns whose names crowd the 
atlas of each state. Something of that distinction and interest 
which American cities so often lack, the presence of a college or 
a university confers. When one reads the roll of American 
towns and cities, a perceptible difference of tone, a recognized 
note of distinction attaches to the names of those which are the 
seats of our higher institutions of learning. For cities, as for 
men. Fame has her eternal bede-roll of great names. And the 
names of many cities which bulk big in millions of property and 
miles of streets and hundreds of thousands of citizens, are passed 
over ; while many a lesser town is secure of its place in the roll 
of the illustrious, because in its college or university it has iden- 
tified itself with interests which are nobler than money-making, 
and has proposed to itself aims which unconsciously ennoble all 
its residents. Where the life of the intellect and the spirit is 
honored and nourished, it is of the very nature of this cherish- 
ing of the life of the mind and the soul, that it brings with it 
immortality for the towns that choose for themselves this high 
distinction. Consider the perennial renown of the university 
towns of Europe. They are serenely possessed of a fame and of 
institutions which endure while dynasties and forms of govern- 
ment change and perish. Where else can you find such perdur- 
ing continuity of life and fame as we see in those great universi- 
ties — ^many of them older now than any reigning house in 
EuTjope, yet full of the vigor of youth — fed by the springs 
which renew the life and the working force of the race with the 



16 PERSONALITY IN POLITICS 

oncoming of each new generation '? It is of the very nature of 
the university to combat ignorance, oblivion and death, — to be 
immortal, as light is immortal ! And the life and light of the 
college and the university are reflected in their surroimdings, 
and add lustre to the names of the to^wns and- cities which found 
and nourish them. 

The City and the College. The True Interest of Life 

IN America, 

;N'ot merely local pride, but a true appreciation of the mean- 
ing of American life, then, an intelligent patriotism, goes into 
the feeling with which every thoughtful American who is a citi- 
zen of a college town should regard the institution which his 
city cherishes. Such a centre of intellectual life by its very 
presence makes life more interesting in many ways for all who 
live within the radius of its immediate influence. 

When Matthew Arnold, keen critic of the intellectual life and 
sworn apostle of culture, was last in America, he stood with 
Oeorge William Curtis, Chevalier Bayard of American journal- 
ists and statesmen, in a small 'New England town, and as they 
spoke together of the essential difference of life in England and 
in America, the English critic said in substance: "You must 
admit that life in American towns like this one, is fearfully 
monotonous and uninteresting. You've no architecture to take 
YOU back through centuries of historic associations by its mere 
presence ; youVe no social distinctions of nobility and rank to 
give variety to your social functions and point to your social 
ambitions ; you've no standing army to make your streets pictur- 
esque by its uniforms and its parades. Such a town as this, for 
instance, must be insufferably dull." With a flash of the eye 
Curtis answered him ; "Your vision has not been touched, that 
you may see and understand the time interest and significance of 
•our American life. That stone building yonder is a public 
library. It was built by a wealthy merchant of New York who 
as a barefoot boy drove the cows home to be milked at that little 
brown farm house on the hillside yonder. Out of the wealth 
he has won, he gives this free library to his native town. In it 



MERRILL EDWARDS GATES IT 

there are twenty thousand books — ^much of the very best litera- 
ture of the world; and from that library constant streams of 
these books, and of the very best of them, make their way into 
the little homes of this ISTew England town. They are read and 
talked about ; and the world's noblest ideas, the world's best 
thought in its finest literature goes into the very life-blood of 
these working people, — true Americans. The interest of our 
American life is found, not in outward pomp shared by the few, 
l)ut in that high average of thought and feeling in our common 
American manhood and womanhood of which this town bears 
witness." 

The life which the university cultivates gives stimulus and 
richness to the life of the city. And it contributes to that result 
for which every man who loves his country longs — the strength- 
ening of the force of personality in the average citizen. 
Through the university and his local pride in it every thought- 
ful resident of Rochester becomes a truer American citizen. 

Local Public Spirit is the Basis of Love of Country. 

For after all the fireside is the focus of patriotism. Love 
of country begins at home, and shows itself in love of home and 
borne institutions. A loyal interest in affairs of local govern- 
ment and local welfare underlies all sound partiotism. It was 
the Greek's intense Ipve of his own city which gave to the world 
the word politics, which means "city affairs." But with the 
Greek the state was a city state; and "city affairs," "politics," 
thus came to mean affairs of government, affairs that have to do 
with the management of the national life, the political state. 
The habit of Greek thought in thus identifying city and father- 
land, the spirit of Greek local patriotism which refused to know 
any political ties of state or nation beyond its own city, has given 
definiteness and intensity to the political thinking of Europe for 
over twenty-five hundred years. And while the great national 
states of modem times have a broader and a far truer conception 
of the state, and have cast aside the narrow limitations of the 
Greek view, it remains an unchanging law of human nature,^ 
nowhere more clearly recognized or more firmly rooted than in 
our American system of local self-government as essential to the 



18 PEBSONALITr IN POLITICS 

Strongest national life, — that a true love of one's home is the 
hasis of all sound love of country. The man who is not a good 
neighbor is not a true patriot. The citizen who truly loves his 
country, loves, too, his own town, cares for the local interests' 
and the political and social well-being of his village, his town- 
ship, his own ward and district. If we are truly loyal citizens- 
of the United States, we are truly devoted to the welfare of the 
commonwealth, the town, the city where lies our own home. And 
the local feeling which leads citizens of Rochester to take pride 
in the intellectual interest and the distinction given to this city 
by the institution whose semi-centennial we observe, becomes a 
truly patriotic impulse when we remember that every such col- 
lege strengthens our American citizenship and adds to the rich- 
ness and the interest of our American life. 

Life 12?" its Highest Foem Cexteks ix the Woek or the 

XJXIVEESITY. 

There is reason for the interest which always attaches to the 
seat of a universitv. Where intensest life in its hiofhest forms 
takes hold on material things and uses them for its own highest 
ends, there matter and material things acquire their supreme 
interest for man. This is the significance of art. A gifted 
personality, (life in its highest form,) has impressed itself upon 
matter; the result is a true work of art — the most interesting 
and charming thing in the universe for man. When, a city wel- 
comes a university to a home within its limits, that city proposes 
that a portion of its grounds and certain of its buildings shall 
be taken possession of by life in its highest form, — ^by the eager 
spirit of youth preparing itself to dominate its heritage, the 
future, — by the intense earnestness of the intellectual life lived 
by old and young together, in pursuit of the highest knowledge 
under the discipline of self-denying application, following the 
guidance of the loftiest ideals. In the aims, the ideals and the 
work of the fully equipped university, the essentially highest 
life of man is fostered and developed. 

Where thought and study and the love of letters in the past 
have touched material things, there centers for men an intensity 



MERRILL EDWARDS GATES 19 

of undying interest. All life is interesting. For the biologist^ 

for the true lover of life who knows the feeling 

"And I am one with all the kinsman things 
That e'er my Father fathered," 

even the scar on the rock which shows where in past ages the 
humblest form of clinging life once laid hold for the support of 
its lowly organized existence, is a sacred sign. All life is mar- 
velous and interesting. Human life is especially sacred. In 
literature and in those studies which provide the subject matter 
and perpetuate the spirit of science, philosophy, art, religion and 
literature, the essential life of man is fostered and developed. 

Where the "masters of those who know," where the divinely 
gifted artists in literature and in life, have associated themselves 
with a particular landscape, with an especial environment, how 
keen is the interest which attaches to such a place for all succeed- 
ing ages ! 

A Morning with Plato at Athens. 

We who have seen and felt something of the wonderful power 
of the Hellenic spirit in the literature and art of Greece, know 
well that we are forever indebted to the poets and orators of that 
marvelous people for a flashing insight into the relations of 
truth and beauty to human life. How indissolubly Plato's 
picturesque ideas blend in memory with the finest aspirations 
and the noblest hours of the college course. If the highest 
function of the poet is "the noble and profound application of 
ideas to life," then poet, philosopher and artist, teacher, states- 
man and philanthropist find inspiration in those lofty ranges of 
thought applied to social life which led Emerson to say, "All the 
Europe of to-day is to be found in the mind and writings of 
Plato." 

And for us who read Plato with that finest of American Pla- 
tonists, Dr. Kendrick, what a charm there is about the opening 
scene of each of these Dialogues ! What Attic love of light and 
stir and beauteous form and newsy gossip and clever friends ! 

"Yesterday evening I returned from the army at Potidaea, 
and, having been a good while away, I thought I would go back 
to my old haunts. So I went to the palaestra of Taureas." 



20 PERSONALITY IN POLITICS 

And there Socrates is saluted on all sides by old friends, and 
after giving an account of his escape, he asks about matters at 
home, ^ 'about philosophy and about the young men, — ^who are 
the promising ones?'' And so we are introduced to Char- 
mides and the charming dialogue concerning self-control that 
bears his name. 

"I was going from the Academy straight to the Lyceum, in- 
tending to take the other walk, which is close under the wall. 
When I came to the postern gate of the city close by the fountain 
of Panops, I fell in with a company of young men who were 
standing there." And Socrates turns aside with them to their 
new club building, and leads them into the talk about friendship 
which is known as the '"Lysis." 

"Who was that person, Socrates, with whom you were talk- 
ing yesterday at the Lyceum ? There was such a crowd around 
you that I could not get within hearing ; but I caught sight of 
him over their heads, and I made out that he was a stranger." 
The stranger was Euthydemus; and Socrates relates to Crito, 
the interlocutor, the substance of their dialogue. 

And most charming of all, the opening scene of the Phaedrus, 
where Socrates and his companion walk out through the city 
suburbs along the course of the Ilissus. (Some of us. Brothers, 
were reading it in Anderson Hall, thirty years ago this spring ! ) 
"Turn this way; let us go to the Ilissus and sit down in some 
quiet spot," says Socrates. "I am fortunate," Phaedrus rejoins, 
"in not having my sandals; and as you never have any, Soc- 
rates, I think that we may go along the brook and cool our feet 
in the water ; this is the easiest way, and at mid-day and in the 
summer is far from unpleasant." "Lead on; and look for a 
place where we may sit down," says Socrates. "Do you see that 
tallest plane-tree in the distance," asks Phaedrus. "Yes." 
"There are shade and gentle breezes and grass on which we may 
either sit or lie down." 

At Athens, on a morning in May, after breakfast of coffee, 
bread with fresh butter made from goat's millc, and honey of 
HjTnettiis, I started to walk up the half-dry bed of the stream 
of the Ilissus. In the summer weather, only little mossy 
streamlets of water were to be seen, making pretty channels for 



MERRILL EDWARDS GATES 21 

themselves here and there through the coarse gravel of the river 
bed, which is washed in winter by a hurrying torrent. Knots 
of women in picturesque costume were kneeling beside little 
pools of water, converting the fountain of Callirrhoe into a con- 
venience for accomplishing the family washing. I walked on 
between overhanging banks up the channel of the stream. On 
either side were gardens, a wealth of wild roses, — ^the deep 
matchless red of the pomegranate in blossom, the grape-vines 
green and fresh and fragrant, poppies and daisies, and beside 
the stream towering clusters of tall rushes; w^hite-breasted, 
black-plumed, glossy-winged swallows filled the air with gleam- 
ing light and cheery twittering; plane-trees, poplars, willows, 
fig-trees, olives, pomegranates, cacti and cypresses bordered the 
bank; Mount Lycabettus toAvered sharp above me close on the 
left. The Lyceum, where Socrates loved to meet his friends 
for talk, and where Aristotle and his followers walked as they 
laid the foundation of the Peripatetic school, was just before 
me. As I went on up the channel, the body of the water in the 
Ilissus was perceptibly increased by a little tributary that made 
its way in from the base of Mount Lycabettus on the right bank 
of the stream. Suddenly it occurred to me that this was just 
the direction Socrates and his friend had taken in the opening 
scene of the Phaedrus. I had in my pocket a volume of Plato 
(as you always do in Athens, if you are wise), and opening it I 
read again that charming introduction of which I just now gave 
you Jowett's translation. It seemed to me that I must be at 
the very spot which Plato describes ; and stepping out from the 
channel of the Ilissus and into that of the little tributary that 
flowed down toward me, and following it for a hundred paces, 
I came to a lovely bank of grass beside the stream beneath a 
cluster of trees. "There were shade and gentle breezes and 
grass on which one might sit or lie down;" and as I stretched 
myself upon the grass and drew doA\m an overhanging branch of 
the tree above my head, what was my delight to find that the 
tallest tree above that bank of grass, now as in Plato's time, was 
a plane-tree overshadowing a little spring, — the ver}'' spot where 
Plato must have sat when he sketched the opening scene of the 



22 PERSONALITY IN POLITICS 

Phaedrus, in which he leads Socrates barefoot up the Ilissus to 
thiat very grassy bank on which I was reclining. 

The ^*^Speing beneath the Plane-teee/^ 
Under the over-shadowing plane-tree of memories that wither 
not but are green and dewy fresh as yestermorn, beside the clear 
spring of our youthful hopes and memories, reflecting Heaven 
always, — for God dwelt in the thought and the poetry, in the 
science and the art on which we "nourished here a youth sub- 
lime" — by "the cool spring under the plane-tree,'' come, let us 
rest a little. Brother Alumni, while we give thanks for the past 
and take fresh strength for the future. 

It is a spring at which we may well drink again — this foun- 
tain of the memory of our college days. 

There are reasons deep in the life of college-bred men, for the 
loyal interest, the abounding hopefulness and joy which mark 
Commencement gatherings at our American colleges. That po- 
litical philosopher, an Englishman by birth and training, who 
has sho\^Ti such sympathetic clearness of vision in studying the 
life and the institutions of the "American Commonwealth," 
professes the conviction that we Americans "are capable of an 
ideality surpassing that of Englishmen and Frenchmen." The 
college life of every college-bred American is indissolubly asso- 
ciated with his highest ideals. If he is capable of enthusiasm, 
if he knew noble teaching in college, the memory of his college 
days must always stir all that is noblest in his manhood. The 
very function of the college challenges enthusiasm and admira- 
tion. It exists to develop light and life and power. He who 
loves a rich, full, strong life must honor the true college. To 
name a college like ours is to name a starry, radiant theme. 

The College Knits Generation to Generation. 

The mission of the college is to diffuse the beneficent light 
of ideas. How can a lighthouse be selfish ? Light and life are 
themes which no man can belittle ; and no surroundings can take 
from them their essential dignity. More light for mind and 
soul, more and fuller life-power to be used in the world's best 
work — this is the significance of the college. What light and 



MERRILL EDWARDS GATES 23 

freedom of soul mark the intercourse of those whose occupation 
is the discovery of truth and the diffusion of ideas ! He ranks 
highest who gives most of unselfish service. In the world of 
ideas we gain hy giving ; and the force we use in serving others 
measures while it increases the force that we can receive. The 
power that is generated at a Christian college diffuses itself like 
fresh air and sunshine, making better all men whom it touches. 

The college knits generation to generation among the thought- 
ful men of our land. Older men are kept in touch with younger 
men through the life-giving power of these ideals which time 
cannot dim. A visit to "Alma Mater" renews in the white- 
haired alumnus "our vernal tendencies to hope," as he meets the 
young men who here "walk as prophecies of the next age." The 
self-perpetuating life of such an institution makes it clear to us 
that each new generation comes into the life of the world as 
Ood's divinely commissioned reinforcement for all good causes. 
Under the unchanging sway of principles cherished in the heart, 
all the force of their new manhood is to be directed to serving 
their fellow men, in that future to whose changing environment, 
it may be, the older men are no longer capable of adapting 
themselves. In the tremendous social enginery which the com- 
ing century will develop, these our younger brothers, our sons, 
must take their part. But we know that if they have learned 
the "preciousness of truth as distinguished from facts," they 
will meet the future fearlessly, as valiant servants of Truth, and 
of the Most High God. 

Thus generation is knit to generation, in the noblest service 
of the race, by those lofty ideals that are the living force in the 
life of a college. 

"The Fountain of Eternal Youth." 

If the wish to meet the older alumni who are more actively 
engaged in the world's work draws the younger men back to Al- 
ma Mater for college anniversaries, certainly the desire to meet 
their old-time friends is not the only motive which brings the 
older alumni to our college gatherings. The men who have lost 
the freshness of their early years feel a subtle need of renewing 



24 PEESONAUTT IN POLITICS 

their jomli bv contact with the younger men. When exuberant 
vitality and excess of life drove westward from the old hive of 
Europe swarms of adventurous explorers and colonists to these 
unknown Hesperian, Floridian shores of ours, the men who 
spent their vital force so lavislily were haunted by a longing to 
renew their youth. The fabled fountain of perpetual youth 
lured westward many of those venturesome idealists whom gold 
alone would not have drawn across the sea. The hope to rein- 
force their life-power and to renew their youth was the impell- 
ing motive. Their love of life was greater than their love of 
gain. 

To see again the visions of youth, to fill again to the brim the 
resources of life and power, to know that sense of energy inex- 
haustible which floods the spirit and the will when we rise to 
those higher planes where the great ''trade-winds of God's pur- 
pose for the race" '*set always one way" in the upper air of 
heaven — this secret of renewed vigor in the strenuous battle of 
life, — do we not find it, my Brothers, in the gatherings of col- 
lege-bred men, at those centers of intellectual and spiritual life 
where Alma ]U!ater, the dear cherishing Hother, says to each one 
of her sons, as she speaks to him of his own life, '*See that thou 
make it after the pattern that was shown thee in the mount !" 

FAilTLY TlL^ITS OF MeX OF ROCHESTER. 

Between the true-hearted alumnus and the college that 
trained him, there is an atmosphere of affection which makes it 
impossible for him to judge his Alma Mater as would an abso- 
lutely unbiased critic. There is a fine truth underlying the say- 
ing, '^'the measure of a man's love for an institution is the meas- 
ure of his longing to make it better." Yet he is not likely to be 
a less loyal or less helpful son, who always has the feeling that 
after all his o^^^l mother's face is the most beautiful woman's 
face he has ever seen. Certainly the alumnus who exhibits hi& 
love only in public criticism of defects in his college, — defects 
which he never gives a dollar to make good, — and confines his 
proofs of his own loyalty to loud denunciations of ^'the lack of 
loyalty on the part of students and alumni" — this type of foster- 



MERRILL EDWARDS GATES 25 

son is much in evidence at certain colleges, and leaves something 
still to be desired. 

Among all the colleges and universities of our land, our 
Mother is our own! In a true sense we are hers. Her life- 
blood is in our veins. Her well-remembered tones find us still 
as does no other voice. Her teachings did much to shape our 
views of life, to teach us its meaning, its possibilities of unselfish 
service. She made us free of the world of thought and letters. 
— cosmopolites, yet her sons, because by her teaching she made 
us free, and confirmed us in the conscious possession and the 
forceful direction of those powers of free manhood which she 
helped us to develop. He is no true man, however great the 
honors he may attain, w^ho forgets or ceases to love his mother. 
Travel widely as we may, dwell where we will, the old home, 
where conscious life began for us, w^here principles, of univer- 
sal appplication now, we first learned by seeing them embodied 
in the lives of our dearest friends — the old home must always be 
^'the dearest spot on earth." And it is the prerogative of the 
American college to be the abiding-place where friends are 
made in those formative years when the intellect awakens to 
the consciousness of its own powers, when the will becomes im- 
perially dominant. And at precisely this, the ideal point for 
the application of moral power, it is the privilege of the college 
to place upon the young man that sovereign 'stamp which shall 
make him pass forever current as good gold coin among his fel- 
low men. When the college uses its divinely-given teaching 
power in bringing to bear upon young manhood that vital truth 
which fortifies and strengthens personality at its center, it gives 
a man control of himself and all his powers, and leads him with 
Wordsworth to say most reverently to duty, "In the light 
of truth thy bondsman let me be.'' 

Did not our college do this for each one of us, my Brothers, 
and shall we not always love her ? 

Respect for thoroughness of scholarship and love for the 
graces of scholarship ; a deep sense of responsibility to God and 
to one's fellow men for the full development and the active use 
of all one's powers of body, mind, heart and will ; confidence in 



26 PKR80NAIJTT IN' POLITICS 

the value to one's seK and to the world of steady work, faithful- 
ly and intelligently done; reverence for fact* of history and of 
science, and in the present as well as in the past ; a clear convic- 
tion that the past is of value to us in the present, that by its les- 
sons, and by our own wise use of them, we may make the future 
better; a sane, a persistent demand for results, for effort that 
shall ••bring things to pass ;'' and a loyal and deeply-grounded 
belief that the sound in theory will unquestionably prove to be 
the consistent in practice, and should be put to the proof by prac- 
tical test, — these are some of the convictions which have gone 
into our lives with our Mother's blood — some of the family 
traints by which we should be quite willing — quite proud — ^to be 
known as Rochester men. 

To BULLD STEOXG PkESOXAXITTES THE GeEATEST WoBK OF THE 

CoELECrE. 

The greatest work of the college is to build strong personali- 
ties, to fit men for that intelligent self -direction and self-mastery 
which invariably carries with it the power of leading and direct- 
ing others. 

If the tendency of popular government is to make "the indi- 
vidual count for less, while the mass counts for more,'' how 
absolutely essential it is to the success of our American system 
of self-government, that each citizen value highly his own man- 
hood, hold it in esteem as a sacred trust, and make the most of 
himself and his opportunities I We cannot in any way serve 
the state more truly than by doing all in our power to strengthen 
the personality, to enlighten the conscience, and develop the 
will-power of every citizen with whom we come into relation. 
In Lord Erskine's words, it is the highest duty of the educated 
citizen, "first, to reverence his o\sni conscience as his king, and 
then, to seek to enlighten others with what his own reason and 
conscience have dictated to him as true." 

OuE Time UxDEKVALrEs the Woeth oe Oxe Max. 
The charge that I bring against the men of our day, is that 
we undervalue the force of the individual wiU. The tendency 
to organize, to incorporate, leads men to overlook the worth, the 



MERRILL EDWARDS GATES 27 

power of one man's personality. But the greater the organiza- 
tion, the greater the demand that arises for strong men of the 
right spirit, to direct it. In the end, experience with cor- 
porations and organizations, like every other phase in the his- 
tory of our American institutions, lays ever increasing em- 
phasis upon the value of a strong personality, upon the worth 
of one man. 

Our forefathers, the Puritans and Pilgrims, — yes, and the 
great Virginians who co-operated with them in shaping our na- 
tional life and institutions — were men to whom their own per- 
sonality was intensely real. They were men of mighty will. 
Their lives well illustrate the words of Trendelenburg — "It is 
conscience that preserves the might of the will." Earnestness, 
energy, lofty purpose, resolute perseverance, — all these heroic 
virtues illustrate their lives. They had learned (in the days 
of sudden faction fights and street brawls, when a strong swords- 
man at your side meant life saved and success won) the mean- 
ing of those words of the greatest of the Puritan poets, "Happy 
the man who walks with that strong-siding champion, Con- 
science." 

Our Forefathers were Men of Mighty Will. They 
Worked out their Ideas in Life. 
The most difficult of all achievements, to get one's ideas ac- 
tually embodied in life and institutions, our forefathers accom- 
plished. They were whole, manly men. They had the force 
of will to live out what other men could only dream about. 
How many men have dreamed the dreams of Plato, of Cicero, 
of Augustine and Sir Thomas More regarding an ideal state, 
^^a true commonwealth," a "republic of God?" But genera- 
tion after generation let time and life slip past in merely dream- 
ing. Or if they sometimes made the effort to carry into effect 
such ideas, they soon gave up the task as one far beyond their 
strength. "My dear philosopher," wrote the great Catherine 
of Russia to Voltaire, "it is not so easy to write one's ideas on 
human flesh as it is on paper." All history bears witness to 
the difficulty of getting one's ideas embodied in life, worked out 
in institutions, even when one has the courage to try. But 



28, PEESONALITY IN POLITICS 

our forefathers were greater than those old builder-kings of 
Egypt, "who did their days in stone." They wrought their 
thoughts and purposes into life. With unfaltering persistence 
of purpose, they lived their lives into institutions that moulded 
a nation which to-day is the model for the civilized world. 
They not only saw the truth, but they were bent upon reducing 
it to practice. They understood that "living is a total act, 
thinking is a partial act." They took that "step from know- 
ing to doing," which Emerson declares "is rarely taken, and 
when taken, is a step out of the chalk circle of imbecility into 
fruitfulness." 

Good Goveen^mejs^ts aee not HI^ppt Accidents. 
The well-organized governinent^ under which the civilized 
people of the world now live are the highest embodiment of the 
result of long continued, unselfish effort on the part of the best 
men of successive generations. The existence of free govern- 
ments, with those "covenanted securities" which they afford to 
liberty, is no happy accident. Xo one object which men have 
proposed to themselves has called for such long-continued, 
strenuous, yet ennobling and beneficent effort, as has, the estab- 
lishment of liberty in institutions and laws. Let not us who 
are "to the manner born," undervalue our birthright. Too 
seldom do we recall the cost to earlier generations of the con- 
tests which have made possible such a government as ours. On 
one day in the year we are reminded that a million heroes in 
blue unifoi-m gave their lives that our government might be 
perpetuated. On another day, in another month, the spirit of 
patriotism is awakened by the memory of that revolutionary 
struggle which freed us from the oppression of a narrow-minded 
English monarch. But the debt we owe to the boys in blue and 
to the heroes of the continental army represents but a trifling 
item in the long-continued, life-consuming struggle by which 
there has been won and established for us that constitutional 
liberty which, the world over, is the proudest heirloom of the 
English speaking race. 

Battle-Monuments in Legal Teems. 
The noblest battle-monuments in the world, it seems to me. 



MEKRILL EDWARDS GATES 25^ 

are certain of the customs and the legal terms in which are 
fossilized the history of generations of soul-animating struggle 
for the establishment and the defense of human rights by law 
and in political institutions. 

Take "trial by a jury of one's peers." What an enormous 
advance in the conception of the worth of the average man it 
<jhronicles! What obstinate and determined struggles to keep 
this the law of the land, so that not the weight of the sword 
or of the long-purse, not the wiil of the privileged noble, or 
the subtle policy of a worldly church with its far-reaching tem- 
poral ambitions, should be allowed to decide the question; but 
the facts should be found by the sound sense of twelve common 
men when they had heard the evidence, and the laAVS and cus- 
toms of the land should then be fairly applied in every case. 
]^o wonder that a brilliant Englishman has declared that "the 
great end of the English constitution is to get twelve honest men 
into a box !" 

Or that safeguard of personal rights so dear to countless gen- 
erations of our ancestors which finds voice in the phrase "my 
house is my castle.'' Think you that principle was wrought 
into law and life and kept there through ages in which flour- 
ished plundering baron-robbers and lawless soldiery, — without 
countless unchronicled deeds of daring on the part of obscure 
ancestors to whom we owe our social and political possibilities ? 

Recall the debt which constitutional government owes to the 
principle, that "supplies for the government shall be voted by 
the people's representatives ;" and as we remember the glorious 
struggle waged by Hampden and his peers, the commoners, 
against Charles's demand for ship-money and his audacious at- 
tempts to over-ride parliament, who does not feel himself the 
debtor of those heroic ancestors of ours ? 

Remember ^'lettres de cachet'' in France, with the horrors of 
a sudden and mysterious disappearance into the living sepul- 
chres of the Bastille, — and then recall with a thrill of pride 
and joy the long contest which preceded and has accompanied 
that simple legal form, wliich is the protection of the unjustly 
imprisoned, in which the justice says to the officer of the law, 
"'^Do thou have his body before me, to show cause why he should 



30 PEES02iALITY IX POLITICS 

be detained as a prisoner.'' Where is there a nobler battle- 
monument to victories won for liberty, than in the Latin phrase 
so heedlessly on onr lips, the right of 'liabeas corpus^' 

We who are in an atmosphere of freedom do not know 
how exhilarating is the air we breathe, until we visit those 
quarters of the globe where liberty is unknown. The man who 
has looked into the eyes of the fatalists of Asia and Africa,. 
who has seen how heavy with oppression is the air of those 
lands where rules the unspeakable Turk, and then returns to 
this, our own dear land of liberty, finds that he is breathing 
an atmosphere sui'charged with hope and with stimidus to 
joyous activity. Life has a new meaning. Opportunity opens 
attractively before every man. ''Every man has a fair chance 
and knows that he has it," — and that is true democracy ! The 
air is overloaded with hope. 

Generations of seK-denying and public-spirited effort on the 
part of our ancestors have made possible for us this free and 
joyous life, under a government that so fully '^establishes jus- 
tice, insures domestic tranquility, and promotes the general wel- 
fare." 

If College ^L-r^ fatl^ it is xot because they have Ideas., 

BUT BECAUSE THEY DO >"0T LIVE BY THEIE LdEAS. 

It is not because college-bred men — inen of clear vision — 
have great ideas, that self-styled '^practical" men sneer at them 
as visionaries. It is because men of ideas do not live by their 
ideals. We must hold to our best ideas and enforce them in 
our living, if we would win respect for ourselves and for them. 
Our forefathers held so strongly to their ideals, lived them 
out with such intensity and earnestness of wiU, that they vita- 
lized an entire continent. They saw what their times needed, 
and they did the deed. As their descendants, we are morally 
bound to be of use to our day and generation. 

In describing the condition of lost men in the Inferno, Dante 
tells us that they knoAv the past history of the world perfectly, 
and they can foretell the future: but of the present they are 
totally and fatally ignorant; so that their knowledge is never 



MERRILL EDWARDS GATES 



31 



of the slightest avail to themselves or others. A like heavy 
curse rests on those who, although trained to a knowledge of the 
past by a study of history, and fond of prophetic forecasts from 
their love of theorizing, are yet without knowledge of the life 
of their own time, without influence upon the opinions and 
deeds of their own people. From this curse may God deliver 
us ! Of every true descendant of our forefathers, of every col- 
lege-bred man, society has a right to expect a strong, active in- 
terest in the affairs of this, our own time. The world looks 
to us to live by those ideas which are the life of the soul. 

Morals in Politics. 

Let us live up to the level of our own best thinking in our 
social and political relations as well as in our private life. 
Since our conviction is clear that there is no reason why pub- 
lic office should be regarded as "'^the spoils" of a successful cam- 
paign, let us stand for civil service reform. Let us speak out 
clearly on all occasions in favor of a clean, honest administra- 
tion of city and state government, and against jobbery and 
trickery of all kinds in elections and in administration. Let 
us not allow our standard of morality to become lower in politi- 
cal affairs than in business affairs. Since we know well that 
buying a vote is a sin and a disgrace, a wrong to the manhood 
of both buyer and seller, and the greatest danger that threat- 
ens our government, let us speak out against it, whoever does 
it. Whatever the social position, the wealth or influence of a 
man who is guilty of buying votes, or attempting to gerryman- 
der a district, whether he belongs to your party or not, let him 
know, and let the community know, that you hold him crimi- 
nally guilty. The quiet toleration of what we know to be im- 
moral will undermine our own principles and relax our own 
moral tone. 

Let our ends be fair and just, and the means by which we 
seek to attain them honorable. 

"Ilim, only him, the shield of Jove defends, 
Whose means are fair and spotless as his ends." 

That we may live fully, purely and strongly in all our na- 
ture, physical, intellectual and moral, and so living may give 



32 PERSONALITY IN POLITICS 

new life and fresh impulse to all with whom we come in con- 
tact — this is our Avish for the college-bred men of Eochester, 
and of all America. 

A Steong Peesoxality is Developed only by High Moral 

Ideals. 
Our national life is rooted in the idea that every man's life 
is of value in itseK, of worth to him, and of most value to the 
state, when made of the most value to him himself. The key- 
note of our American system is found in the fullest and highest 
development of the individual man and woman, — in the 
strengthening of those ''sacred bases of personality'' on which 
rests the fabric of the nation. The strength of our national 
life depends upon the faithfulness with which we hold by the 
maxim, "See that thou regard every man as having in himseK, 
in the development of his own life, the true object and end of 
his being, so far as his relations ^vith. you are concerned." 
■^^Thou shalt not debase, in thyself or in another, the highest 
manhood." "'Use no man as thy tool ; but in thy dealing with 
every man, consider the importance to himseK of his own life. 
Honor his manhood, help him to develop it, and on penalty of 
harm to thine own soul, see that thou sacrifice not his best in- 
terest, his highest manhood, as a means to thine own selfish 
ends." 

Our American Principle: "Use no ]\Ian as Thy Tool.'^ 
In the light of this principle only can there be wise adjust- 
ment of the conflicting claims and vexed relations of labor and 
capital. What capital shall do with the laborer is not a mere 
question of dollars and cents. It is a question of responsible 
persons dealing with the essential dignity of manhood in a 
brother man. The sacred element of personality enters into 
the day's labor. 

This Tests Eight Eel.\tion of Labor and Capital. 
When you buy of a laboring man all he has in the world to 
sell on that day, — his voluntary use of his own powers — and buy 
it at the only time when and in the only place where it can 



MEBEILL EDWAKDS GATES 33 

* 

have for him any money-value, in buying his working powers 
for the day, you are dealing with a living soul, made in God's 
image. The sacred obligation rests on you, to see to it that you 
so manage the bargain as not to force him to debase in himself 
his own manhood. Kespect in every man his right and his duty 
to use his own life as bavins; in itself its own end. 

This Tests 'Teactical Politics.'' 
This same principle finds fruitful application in political 
life. To seek for political influence in upright and noble ways, 
through convincing the reason and awakening and satisfying 
right desires, is an honorable ambition. But since every man 
ia to be regarded as an intelligent agent, bound to direct his 
own life toward rational ends and under moral law, how dis- 
graceful becomes the work of the politician who is known as a 
clever ^'manipulator of men." He does not appeal to reason. 
He does not influence men as men. He "handles" men as his 
blind tools. He debases manhood in himself and in others. 

We see too what a flood of light this principle throws upon 
the enormous wrong done to American manhood by bribery at 
the ballot-box, whether the price paid is the direct money-bribe, 
or a public office, which should be a public trust, but is debased 
to the level of partisan plunder. 

The same principle guides us in our efforts to make chari- 
table aid to others a blessing and not a curse. We have no 
right to "help" a man in any way that will debase his man- 
hood. To help others to help themselves, — to make our charity 
build up and not break down self-respect and manhood — this is 
the test of wise and true charitable work for others. 

This Tests Forms of Government. 
In forms of government, too, this is a testing principle. 
That is the best form of government which best develops the 
individual man in all his relations to the society in which it 
prevails. The ideal form of government is not the perfectly 
wise and good autocrat ruling, even by the best of codes, a 
blindly obedient people. The ideal state is an active, intelli- 
gent, upward striving people ruling themselves at the cost of 
8 



34 PEB80NAUTT IN POLITICS 

occasional failures, and with a conscious effort which strength- 
ens and develops those who put into it thought and purpose. 
This is the American ideal. This is the government that best 
develops every man who shares in the duties and responsibili- 
ties of citizenship under its sway. This is the embodiment 
in the state of the maxim, "treat every man as having in the 
development of himself the end of his own being." This leaves 
no man to be used as the t-ool of another man. This is the 
principle of the government our forefathers founded. And 
this is the form of government which most effectively makes- 
manly men. This builds up personality in the individual, and 
strengthens the body politic because it makes strong each one 
of its component parts. 

OuE Greatest Leadebs have Led by Respecting Reason in 

THE IxDIVrOTJAL VOTEE. 

The men who have most truly led and most wisely governed 
our people have been those who have had faith in the indi- 
vidual citizen, have trusted his power to think for himself, and 
have appealed to that power. By setting before his mind right 
views of his circumstances and his duties, they have truly led 
him, by helping him to govern himseK in the light of truth. 
All our people think. Xot all allow their daily papers to do 
what they call their thinking for them. How wonderfully our 
greatest popular leader — our greatest American ruler — Abra- 
ham Lincoln, led the people by appealing to their intelligence ; 
by first thinking out public questions himself, and then getting 
the people to "think things through with him." For the peo- 
ple to read one of Lincoln's state papers was "to hear themselves 
thinking aloud," says LoAvell. And yet he did not constantly 
"put his ear to the ground" to listen for the popular will. He 
was the true type of popular leader — keeping so near to the 
people that he could see eye to eye with them, and he and they 
could hear each other's voice; — and yet always himself giving 
utterance to the noblest, truest view, and giving it such clear and 
forceful utterance that they all took the truth he spoke as truth 
they had always seen, and always had meant to carry into ac- 



MERRILL EDWARDS GATES 35 

lion. They followed him; and they were at their best as men 
while they followed; for their own reason and conscience led, 
with him. 

Such Leadership makes Mainly Men. 
That is true leadership. The "leader'*' who perpetually 
looks backward over his shoulders to learn from the course 
taken and the cries uttered by the crowd behind him which 
way he shall lead them has no divine commission as a leader 
of men. "Where there is no vision, the people perish." 

In these days of decision, at the parting of the ways, — Oh, 
for such thoughtful outspoken leadership, relying on the in- 
telligence and the conscience of the people, and speaking, from 
a life that lends weight to his words, the calmest confidence in 
the power of righteousness and in the ultimate victory of truth 
and justice ! To lead men by increasing their knowledge and 
strengthening their love of righteousness — this shows the power 
of a great personality in politics. And it strengthens the power 
of every person to whom it appeals. This is the leadership 
which makes stronger the personality of the leader and of those 
whom he leads. 

It is this "strengthening of the sacred bases of personality," 
by the appeal to intelligence and conscience which gives us the 
true type of American citizen — the manly man. 

The Vision of a Man. 

How those forefathers of ours were haunted, were almost 
divinely possessed by the lofty conception of what a true man 
should be! How nobly their ideal man still holds his place 
among the world's ideals ! 

To see a true man! There has always been a fascination 
for the race in this vision of what man may be, of what a true 
man is, in the fulness of his manhood. Each new epoch for the 
race has been marked, has been ushered in, by a fresh, a fuller 
revelation of the essential man. 

The man for the state ; "the man exists to help make up the 
nation; the state is supreme, the man is to be sacrificed to the 
state ; the man is of consequence only as he is a constituent part 



36 PERSONALITY IN POLITICS 

of the state," — this was the highest view of the relation of the 
individual and the state under the older civilization of Europe. 

You know the source whence there came into the life of 
modern Europe the higher conception of the value of a man. 
When Christian truth had touched the eyes of the nations, they 
began "to see men" — dimly, at first, "as trees walking." And 
the vision of manhood has grown in power with each success- 
ive revelation of its fuller meaning. 

The great German, Karl, began to see the vision, and in 
Charlemagne's far reaching plans for a system of popular edu- 
cation throughout his empire, began the struggle between the 
older order and the vision of a true man. To see men every- 
where, and not only in lords and nobles, — here began the strife 
between the old order and the new, in which the stiff yew bows 
of English yeomen won the day against the nobles of France 
at Crecy and Poictiers, and sent yard-long arrows of conviction 
home into the noble hearts of England, so that of Gorman nobles 
and Saxon yeomen one race was formed; and the greatest vic- 
tory won on those fields was the clearer vision of the value of 
a man as over against the feudal system which had dominated 
and deadened all Europe. 

To see man as free in conscience, with the Bible in his own 
hands and the light of God streaming from it to bless the home 
without the intervention of priest or mass, was the next revela- 
tion. Luther saw the vision, and straightway rose from his 
knees on the stairway of superstition, stood erect before God 
and man, and bent not at Worms to nobles, bishops, emperor, 
pope or devil ! In this larger light from above, the whole 
world saw a man — free in conscience under God — and the 
world strode forward to the Eeformation. 

The power of the mighty empire of Spain and Austria sought 
to rob the world of this newly discovered birth-right, of this 
larger vision ; and when the "Gueux" in Holland were willing 
to assume the name of "beggars" so they might win and defend 
the rights of men, the world caught sight of the heroic figure 
of a man at once free in conscience and religion, and free to 
federate with other men in a civil government where local rights 



MERRILL EDWARDS GATES 37 

and federated national life were both guarded in the great 
^'United States" of Holland. This vision of a man once seen, 
the legions of Parma could not destroy, though they pillaged, 
burnt and starved whole cities, and buried alive or burned at 
the stake thousands who had seen the vision and would rather 
die than give it up. 

Still the inspiration made its way among the nations; and 
Hampden, Pym, and Cromwell are witnesses to the fact that 
Old England, even when our forefathers were driven by con- 
science from her shores, was lifting up her eyes to see in every 
Englishman, whether nobleman or commoner, a free man. 

The figure that led our fathers into exile and drew them to 
the conquest of a continent for freedom and for God, was the 
figure of a man, civilly and religiously free! And to-day the 
divinely-given prerogative of America, redeemed from the curse 
of domestic slavery and entering hopefully on her second cen- 
tury of life, is still to see a man in every son of humanity — 
to see all men free and all men brothers. May we have the 
courage and the good faith to be true to this vision, in our own 
South land and in the islands East and West ! 

The Supreme Ideal. 
But if the vision of a man has had so potent an influence 
upon the race, what might our lives become if we had continu- 
ally before our eyes a clear vision of that One Divine Person, 
who is God in man? Does it not sometimes seem to you, my 
Brothers, that in our round of easily worn customs and easily 
uttered phrases, we are but playing at admiration of the spirit 
of Christ? Suddenly the great social ship in which we are 
voyaging, with a heavy sea-lurch shows us, running close and 
swift beside us, the awful billows of need and sin and misery 
which we had well-nigh forgotten. At such moments of awak- 
ened vision, we see that we have almost let escape us the spirit 
of the Sermon on the Mount. To use old Berridge's sharp, 
revealing phrase, "While we are idly complimenting Jesus with 
a prayer for help," a swift-flashing revelation of the awful need 
of the race comes to us in the snarl of the war-demon, in the 



38 PEKSO^'ALITY IX POLITICS 

howl of the anarchists and nihilists, in the yearning outcry for 
real brotherhood in living which stirs mightily in the social- 
istic movements of oni* time. Our eyes are opened and we see 
that Christ, the Living God, is not to be trifled with ! Life is 
either wholly His, or it is wholly wasted. And the fuller mean- 
ing of the life of Christ is revealed to us as we see how utterly 
His life meets the ever-widening, ever-deepening desire of the 
nations. 

The Oxe Peesoxality Who is *'"'the Desiee of the Xa- 

TIOXS. 

All the teaching of history tends to the clearer con- 
ception of One Divine Personality in our race. How epoch 
after epoch has placed before the nations with ever-increasing 
clearness the ideal of the perfect man! And as the yearning 
toward brotherhood for the whole race becomes deeper and 
stronger, while the nations join hands in international associa- 
tions and flash thoughts into each other's lives through inter- 
national cables; as the accelerating swift momentum of this 
closing nineteenth century sweeps us on toward a sense of the 
solidarity of the race deeper and stronger than the world has 
ever knoTMi before; how clearly we, whose eyes Christ has 
touched, can see that the blind groping of the race in past ages 
has been after the One Who is more and more fully revealing 
Himself as the age ripens. Xen can never truly be brothers 
save as they remember that we have one Father; — ^that in the 
acknowledged fatherhood of God lies the only true hope for the 
universal brotherhood of jnen ; and that the eflort of the ages 
to see a true man, is fully met in the divine man, Christ Jesus, 
who is also God, who through all these generations, while they 
knew it not, has been the **Desire of the Xations.'' 

The Heliocexteic View. 
The world has caught a view of Christ ; and in the light 
that streams from Him, we are set at the center of hope for 
the world. Our view of the race and its problems becomes 
heliocentric. One who in thought looks out from the sun upon 
our system understands how the Greeks spoke of the sun-god. 



MERRILL EDWARDS GATES 39 

Apollo, as the one "whose bright eye lends brightness and 
never yet saw a shadow.'' Men and nations who see Christ 
and invoke His aid in the problems of our time, are clothed 
upon with a power that can come from no other source. Thej 
become like that mighty angel who stood in the sun to speak 
out with power the will of "Him who hath on His vesture and 
on His thigh a name written. King of Kings and Lord of 
Lords." 

For the nation we love, the source of the strong personality 
we need in politics is to be found in that true vision of a man, 
which comes only from the vision of the Man who was also God ; 
— of whom we reverently declare with Jean Paul Richter, 
"'^He was the holiest among the mighty and the mightiest among 
the holy, who with pierced hands lifted the gates of empires 
off their hinges, turned the course of history out of its chan- 
nel, and still governs the ages.'' 



The Morning Exercises of Semi-centennial Day 



ADDEESS OF WELCOME 
Actiiig President Henrt Faibfikld Bubton 

As the representative of the Trustees and Faculty of the 
University I have the agreeable duty of welcoming the gradu- 
ates and former students of the college, the graduates and rep- 
resentatives of other colleges, our guests from abroad and the 
citizens of Rochester to this semi-centennial celebration. 

Those who have planned the exercises of the day have had in 
mind certain worthy ends which they hope the observance of 
this anniversary will promote. 

It has seemed fitting that at the close of these fifty years of 
service in the cause of higher education we should recall the 
past, — the aims and ideals of the founders, the constant efforts 
of their successors to realize those high ideals, and the broaden- 
ing and improvement of the original plan which the progress 
of the science of education and the growing demands of the 
time have made necessary. From this survey we shall learn 
how far the University has fulfilled its duty to the community 
by which it is surrounded and to its larger constituency in the 
state and the nation. 

A second purpose of this celebration has been to bring to- 
gether as large a number as possible of the alumni of the Uni- 
versity, that our knowledge of them and their knowledge of 
us and their acquaintance with each other may be revived and 
enlarged, to the end that the consciousness of our unity and 
the sense of a common intellectual parentage may inspire anew 
our devotion and loyalty to the college. 

Again it has seemed fitting that on this anniversary we should 
receive the greetings of other institutions of like character, and 



HENRY FAIRFIELD BURTON 41 

hj comparison of our aims and methods with theirs gain in- 
struction and stimulus in our common work. 

Above all it has been our desire that at this time there should 
be presented for our thought, by some master of the theory and 
the art of the training of the mind, certain great educational 
principles and ideals which may guide us in the future. 

These purposes of our jubilee seem already certain of fulfil- 
ment. We have been so fortunate as to secure the aid of men 
6f distinction in educational work and in public life who have 
already spoken or are still to speak to us words of wisdom and 
encouragement. Many graduates of the University who have 
gained marked success in their several callings have gathered 
to pay honor to their Alma Mater, and their presence reminds 
us of hundreds of their brethren no less worthy who are un- 
able to be with us. 

May we not cherish a well founded confidence that the cele- 
bration of this day, in which are gathered up the impulses de- 
rived from the past, the enthusiasm of the present moment and 
the hopes with which the future is bright, may inspire our be- 
loved University with fresh vigor and courage for the work of 
the new century which awaits us ? 



HISTORICAL ADDRESS 

The University of Rochester in its Relation to the 
Educational Movement of the Last Fifty Years 

Professor WttiTJAm Cabey Moret, Ph. D. 

We are accustomed to look upon the celebration of an anniver- 
sary as a time in which we are called upon to review the past, 
to consider the present, and to cultivate hopes for the future. 
It is a time alike for reminiscence, for reflection, and for reso- 
lution. Especially is this true when an institution of higher 
education gathers about itself its friends and its children to 
celebrate the first haK century of its existence. Although fifty 
years may not be regarded as a long period in the corporate 
life of an institution, it is sufiiciently long to form some in- 
telligent judgment as to its character, the nature of the work 
it has accomplished and the reasons wliich justify its being. 

There are many considerations, which we might at this time 
dwell upon, tending to show that the University of Rochester 
has cause for congratulating itseK upon its existence and its 
history. Although it was born in the midst of controversy and 
bitter strife, its career and achievements have been such as 
to justify the wisdom of the men who from the first believed 
that it had a worthy mission to perform in the educational 
world. The clouds which seemed to darken its early years 
have happily passed away. Instead of proving a rebellious 
child of an indignant mother, it has made a common cause with 
that older institution whose beneficent light still shines from 
the hills of Hamilton. If that man can be regarded as a bene- 
factor to the race who makes t^vo blades of grass grow where 
one grew before, those men must be credited with a phil- 
anthropic deed Avho caused two institutions of learning to 
flourish where but one flourished before. It would not be in- 



WILLIAM CAREY MOfJEY 43 

appropriate at this time to linger about the lives of these men 
whom we honor as the founders of this institution; to pass 
in review their noble traits of character, their liberal views, 
their lofty ideals and their valuable work in the cause of 
higher education. It would not be inappropriate also to ex- 
press our appreciation of their successors, who have with 
high resolve and devotedness of purpose labored for the same 
high end. It would certainly not be inappropriate in this 
hour of reminiscence to dwell upon the character of our revered 
teachers who have now passed from our sight, but who in 
their lifetime, w^hether in the presidential or in the professorial 
chair, conferred distinction upon this seat of learning. But 
the delineation of the personal character of these men and the 
expression of our esteem and veneration for their work — sub- 
jects in an eminent degree befitting this occasion — I shall leave 
to others who have been chosen to perform this exalted and 
sacred duty. 

The real history of a seat of learning, like that of a com- 
munity or a nation, is not merely personal, but institutional. 
It does not consist merely in the deeds and reputation of in- 
dividuals, but in the growth of that larger corporate life which 
transcends the life of any individual, and which maintains a 
continued existence after the individual has passed away. 
With the growth of the modern historical method, it has come 
to be recognized that individual men must be judged by what 
they have contributed to the permanent institutions of society ; 
and that institutions themselves must be judged by what they 
have contributed to the higher life of humanity. This is pre- 
eminently true of an institution of learning, whose essential 
mission is to benefit mankind. The success of a college does 
not depend merely upon the great names of which it may boast, 
not even upon the magnitude and costliness of the equipment 
which it possesses, but upon the extent to which it has aided in 
the intellectual and moral elevation of the community, and 
the extent to which it has kept itself in harmony with the educa- 
tional progress of the world. It would probably be no exaggera- 
tion to say that there has been no period in human history of 



44 HISTOBICAL ADDBESS 

equal duration in Tvhicli the whole system of education has been 
affected by such important changes and progressive reforms as 
those ^\'hich have characterized the half century covered by the 
lifetime of this University. A peculiar interest, therefore, at- 
taches to the work of an institution whose career has been al- 
inost conterminous with this eventful era. It is on account of 
this peculiar interest that I desire to call your attention, for the 
brief space of time which has been assig-ned to me, to the Eela- 
tion of the University of Rochester to the Educational Move- 
ment of the Last Fifty Years. 

Men are no doubt inclined to overestimate the importance of 
the period in which they happen to live. But it does not re- 
quire the high coloring of fancy to enable us to perceive in our 
present age evidences of advancement which distingiiish it from 
all its predecessors. Although not marked by the great geo- 
graphical discoveries of the fifteenth century, or the religious 
upheaval of the sixteenth, or the political revolutions of the 
seventeenth and eighteenth, it has yet been an age pre-eminent 
in breadth of culture, in liberalizing tendencies in all depart- 
ments of human thought and action, political, religious, intel- 
lectual, industrial ; an age in which the htiman horizon has been 
extended, in which human sympathies have been broadened, in 
which humanity itself has come to be looked upon more and 
more as a sing'le organism. In no other age have there been 
evinced to such an extent the synthetic tendencies of human 
progress, the reconciliation of divergent views and divergent 
forms of acti^^ty, the sympathy of men of thought and men 
of action, the adjustment of opposing beliefs, the harmoniz- 
ing of religion and science, the alliance of faith and honest 
doubt, the union of law and liberty, of conservatism and progress, 
the acceptance and co-ordination of all forms of truth, the old 
and the new, through a healthy spirit of toleration and liberal- 
ism. This liberalizing tendency has been especially manifest 
during the later years of the centtiry ; and in no phase of social 
life has it shown itself in a more marked degree than in the 
transformation of our educational svstem. 



WILLIAl^r CAREY MOREY 45 

The educational system which prevailed in the United States 
in 1850 was substantially that of the sixteenth century, and 
was for the most part the product of the Renaissance. The 
Latin studies which had marked the mediaeval period were then 
supplemented by the Greek studies which followed the revival 
of letters; and these in turn were supplemented by the study 
of mathematics, then the dawning science of Europe. Latin 
and Greek and mathematics formed, in the sixteenth and seven- 
teenth centuries, the staple means of a liberal education. What- 
•ever language or science was taught, was mainly gath- 
ered from the pages of Latin and Greek authors; and as 
grammar became a distinct science, these authors were read 
more as illustrations of grammatical rules than for the pur- 
pose of interpreting the world of human thought. Education 
was based upon authority, and instruction was largely dog- 
matic, making of the mind a passive recipient of results rather 
than an active agent in the investigation of truth. This, for 
the most part, constituted the traditional education of Europe 
for more than two hundred years. In its subjects and methods 
it became stereotyped, and irresponsive to the progressive 
changes in the intellectual and social environment. This sys- 
tem of education was transplanted from England to the Ameri- 
can colonies. It is said that Harvard College was organized in 
imitation of Emmanuel College, Cambridge; and this formed 
the chief model for most of the institutions in the thirteen orig- 
inal states. 

The defects of this traditional education are no doubt more 
apparent to us to-day than to those who knew very little, of any 
other system. In spite of its high and praiseworthy aims, and not- 
withstanding the eminent men who presided over its administra- 
tion, this early education appears, in the light of a more mod- 
ern system, narrow in its scope, irrational in its methods, and 
ill-adapted to meet the wants of a progressive civilization. 
Largely ecclesiastical in its spirit, its attention was directed 
chiefly to the wants of a particular profession. With a uniform 
prescribed curriculum, it crowded all types of mind into one 
channel of discipline. Based upon traditional learning, it 



46 HISTORICAL ADDRESS 

was slow to accept the results of modern scientific discovery. 
With the claims of authority, it discouraged the spirit of free 
inquiry and failed to awaken the sense of responsibility for the 
personal perception of truth. By the constant use of a dog- 
matic method it could hardly fail to create dogmatic men — 
men who had little tolerance for opinions and convictions not 
taught in the curriculum of the schools, and who were not pre- 
pared to sympathise with alien forms of thought or the diver- 
sified activities of the world. 

But it is not so important for our purpose to rehearse the 
defects of this older system as to indicate the important changes 
by which was produced the system of to-day, which may be 
called essentially a "new education." It was not until about 
the middle of the century that intelligent dissatisfaction with 
the scope and methods of the traditional system began to be 
expressed in the United States. In 1842 President Wayland of 
Brown University first published his "Thoughts upon the Pres- 
ent Collegiate System of the United States," which called atten- 
tion to some of the existing defects. The opinions of President 
Wayland were in general accord with those of his old teacher, 
President 'Nott of Union College, who did not himseK always re- 
spect the authority of tradition. In 1851 Professor Tappan, a 
graduate of Union, and afterward Chancellor of the University 
of Michigan, published a "Treatise on University Education," in 
which the narrowness and inadequacy of the prevailing curricu- 
lum were set forth, and suggestions w^ere made for a broader 
training. In 1854 President Barnard of Columbia College, 
who was a man of scientific tastes, published a "Keport on Col- 
lege Education," which showed by means of carefully prepared 
statistics that the proportion of students in American colleges 
was gradually decreasing, and expressed the view that this was. 
caused by a general dissatisfaction with the narrow range of 
studies offered by the ordinary college. Harvard College had 
already made some attempts, in the face of much opposition, 
to supply the defects of the existing course of study by the in- 
troduction of a few "electives" and supplementary lectures. 
But it was not until 1867 that Hari-ard adopted a newly organ- 



WILLIAM CAREY MOREY 4.7 

ized curriculum, which greatly increased the number of studies, 
and was also based largely upon the principle of election. This 
new curriculum not only indicated a policy openly antagonis- 
tic to the traditional system, but it may be said to have fur- 
nished a sort of battle-ground upon which the friends of the 
old and the advocates of the new education waged war for 
the next twenty years. 

During the progress of this controversy, it was quite natural 
that many false issues should be joined. At one time, it 
seemed to be a conflict between classical and scientific learning, 
one party being represented as the upholders of a dead past, 
and the other being charged with invading the approved 
culture of the world with a motley host of unverified 
hypotheses. At another time, it seemed to be a conflict be- 
tween liberal culture and technical training, one party appearing 
to insist that a college training was an end in itself, and the 
other that it was merely a preparation for a special vocation. 
But, like all honest controversies, this conflict of opinion served 
to make more clear the distinction between the essential and 
the non-essential, between what was true and what was false in 
the claims of both parties. On the one side, the conservative 
educators of the country pointed out the great disciplinary 
benefits to be derived from the study of the classics and mathe- 
matics; they showed the importance of language as a means 
of training, as a vehicle of thought, and especially the value of 
the languages of Greece and Rome as the depositories of the 
high culture of the ancient world. The progressive educators, 
on the other side, showed that the traditional scheme of 
studies did not fully meet all the demands of modern life ; that 
our education was not a true reflex of our civilization ; that the 
remarkable discoveries of modern science were not sufficiently 
utilized; and that the importance of language should not be 
made to overshadow the importance of those realities which it 
is the function of language to embody and express. It thus 
became evident, on the one hand, that no truly liberal education 
can ignore the heritage of the past; that it is quite as impor- 
tant to preserve what we have as to seek for what we have not ; 



48 HISTORICAL ADDRESS 

that the language^ the literature and the civilization of Greece 
and Kome have become such an integral element of our modem 
culture that to abandon them would be to sacrifice a part of 
ourselves. It also became quite as e\ddent, on the other hand, 
that a progressive education, while preserving its intellectual 
inheritance, must keep itself in harmony with the movement 
of modern life, must continually adjust itself to the new intel- 
lectual and social needs which the modern world presents. 
While it preserves the old, it must accept the new; while it 
insists upon the importance of classical learning, it must also 
recognize the value of scientific truths ; while it lays the solid 
foundations of a liberal culture, it must also see to it that this 
liberal culture affords an adequate preparation for the stern 
realities of actual life. 

The smoke of this educational controversy has now, for the 
most part, passed away. We scarcely ever hear to-day in our 
colleges and universities of any antagonism betw^een the old and 
the new education. Indeed, the higher education which has 
come to prevail is neither the old nor the new, in the sense of 
their extreme advocates. The education of the present, as dis- 
tinguished from that of the past, is something higher and 
broader and more liberal than that which was advocated by 
either "classicists" or "scientists." It is an education which seeks 
to conserve all the real achievements of human thought, whether 
the products of the ancient world or of the modem world, 
whether in the field of letters or in the domain of science. It 
is also an education which seeks to utilize all the intellectual 
and moral forces which are available for the development of 
manhood ; and to develop that form of manhood which is most 
serviceable to mankind. 

The distinctive character of the educational movement of the 
last fifty years will be more apparent by referring to some of its 
special features. The first and perhaps the most con- 
spicuous of these is the expansion of the college curriculum. 
One of the peculiarities of the curriculum of fifty years ago, 
notwithstanding its claim to be liberal, was the narrow and ex- 
tremely limited range of subjects with which it brought the 



WILLIAM CAREY MOBEY 4& 

mind into contact. Latin, Greek and mathematics formed, as 
they did two hundred years before, the principal elements of a 
college course. Whatever of science or history or philosophy 
was taught seemed to be furnished as a sort of desultory 
diversion for upper classmen, who were supposed to be entitled 
before graduation to a brief respite from the disciplinary toil 
involved in the extraction of linguistic and mathematical roots. 
The greater part of the scientific achievements of an age prolific 
in scientific discoveries was either entirely ignored or inade- 
quately recognized. The first steps in the expansion of the 
curriculum seem to have proceeded from the department of 
mathematics, to which was soon attached the nondescript sci- 
•ence entitled "natural philosophy," which was afterward more 
specially differentiated into astronomy, physics, and chemistry. 
The natural sciences, which were early supposed to sustain 
some dangerously close relation to a materialistic or otherwise 
heretical philosophy, were cautiously admitted to the course, 
with the tacit proviso that geology should be made to harmon- 
ize with Genesis, and that biological theories should not be al- 
lowed to conflict with the traditional views as to the origin of 
the human species. But it is to the credit of American col- 
leges that all the great departments of human science have at 
last received a due recognition. Even the once dreaded doc- 
trine of evolution has obtained a cordial reception; and the 
broad principle has become accepted that the law of progressive 
■development which controls the phenomena of the external world 
is not inconsistent with a recognition of the progressive develop- 
ment of religious truth in the heart of mankind. As the result 
of the gradual admission of scientific studies, it is not too much 
to say that the college curriculum of to-day is in full harmony 
with the scientific tendencies of our scientific age. 

In the study of language also there has been shown a simi- 
lar tendency toward expansion. Whatever importance may be 
fittached to the languages and literatures of the ancient world, 
it has been made evident that they are not the only storehouses 
of human wisdom. The languages of the modern world — of 
Goethe and Schiller, of Moliere and Kacine, of Shakespeare 
4 



50 HISTORICAL ADDRESS 

and Milton — have at least some claim upon the student of 
literature. To be a participant in the activities of the modem 
world, an educated man must keep abreast of the modern world ; 
and to do this he must be acquainted with the influential lan- 
guages of the modem world. To possess that culture which 
Latin and Greek aflord will not atone for the lack of that 
knowledge which the French and the German impart. And to 
be a potont factor in the society in which one is to live and to 
labor, an acquaintance with all the foreign tongues cannot take 
the place of a thorough mastery of one's own national language 
and literature. It is for these reasons that the study of the 
modern languages, including the English, has secured a larger 
place than ever before in the scheme of college education. 
Moreover, the study of history — which has been almost entirely 
reconstructed by the application of a scientific method, and 
which has come to be based not upon the rhetorical and highly 
drawn narration of spectacular events but upon the critical 
study of the institutional progress of mankind — ^has found a dis- 
tinct and important place in the modem curriculum. A higher 
importance has also been given to social, political, legal, and 
economic studies. In fact the modern curriculum has come to 
be, in its scope, no longer a narrow treadmill where the attempt 
is made to develop the mind by a tiresome and repetitious rou- 
tine of monotonous toil, but a broad arena where men are trained 
by being brought into sympathetic contact with the varied intel- 
lectual activities of the world in which they live and in which 
they must eventually labor. 

Besides the expansion of the curriculimi, the educational 
movement of the last half century has been marked by another 
special feature, that is, the introduction of the voluntary sys- 
tem, which grants to the student a large freedom in the selec- 
tion of his studies. It was natural for those who were bred 
under the old system of prescribed studies to suppose that free- 
dom might tend to make of the student a shirk, that he would 
naturally be tempted to "follow the line of least resistance" — 
not realizing that the line of least resistance might perhaps prove 
to be the line of ojreatest achievement. The theorv that the aver- 



WILLIAM CARET MOREY 61 

age student might prove to be a shirk and a drone was not 
entirely unwarranted, from the disposition which he had al- 
ready shown under the prescribed drill and drudgery of the 
old system. Whether he would awaken to the duties of an 
active, intelligent being by the gift of freedom seemed a ques- 
tion of hazardous import. But it was not long before the dis- 
covery was made that, whatever might be the theoretical ob- 
jections to it, the adoption of the voluntary system was a practi- 
cal necessity — an inevitable sequence of an enlarged curricu- 
lum. When the course became expanded, it could not all be 
prescribed ; and a distinction must be drawn between required 
and elective studies — between what were regarded as fundamen- 
tal, which must be prescribed, and what might be looked upon 
as superstructural, which might be thrown open to the free 
choice of the student. 

It was soon found that election was not a synonym for ease ; 
on the contrary, that an elective study, from its special nature, 
afforded an opportunity for a more thorough treatment on the 
part of the instructor, and for more thorough work on the part 
of the student; in fact, that the sense of responsibility and 
zealous interest which freedom involved conferred upon the 
student the spirit of the scholar ; and that the educational value 
of an elective study, in the matter of discipline and acquirement, 
perhaps surpassed that of a prescribed study. It was also found 
that the freedom to select from a wide range of studies produced 
a liberalizing effect which could not result from the compulsion 
to follow the narrow track of a single prescribed course. In 
choosing his elective studies, the student had laid before him 
not simply Latin and Greek and mathematics, but the wide field 
of literature, — ^modern as well as ancient ; of science, — physical, 
natural, social, political, legal, economical ; of history, — that of 
his own as well as that of other countries ; and in making his 
choice, he was obliged to discriminate between the merits and 
respective claims of these various subjects. He was thus led 
to realize that there is much in the scheme of human knowledge 
which he could not attain for himself, but which might be quite 



52 HISTORICAL ADDRESS 

as important as that which he himself had selected. This sys- 
tem tended to make of the college a community of interested 
men who were pursning different lines of study, each of whom 
came to have a sympathetic respect for forms of truth other 
than those which he might be pui^uing, and also a sym- 
pathetic regard for those men who had chosen other fields of in- 
vestigation. The liberalizing effect of the new education in 
this respect is seen not only in broadening the outlook of the 
student while in college, but in preserving the spirit of liberal- 
ity after he has passed beyond the college walls; and, conse- 
quently, it is seen ia the gradual passing away from the minds 
of educated men of that spirit of intellectual intolerance — ^the 
odium theologicum and the odium scientificum — ^which was so 
prevalent in past generations. 

There are other important features of the new educational 
movement which we might consider did our limited time per- 
mit. We might consider the more rational methods of instruc- 
tion which have been adopted; the substitution of the •'•seminary^' 
or co-operative method for the authoritative or dogmatic 
method; the training of the powers of observation and reason 
as well as that of the memory; the teaching of the methods as 
well as the results of investigation: the use of the laboratory 
as well as the text-book — all of which tend to inspire the stu- 
dent with a zealous interest in the pursuit of truth, and to cre- 
ate in him a sense of personal responsibility for the degi-ee of his 
success or failure. We might also consider the more sympa- 
thetic relation which has come to exist between the student and 
the instructor, in place of the old relationship of tacit oppo- 
sition, which made of the student's bench a kind of hatching 
place of mischief and the professor's chair more or less an 
anxious seat. We might consider the new methods of college 
discipline, which have for the most part consigned to the past 
the old system of authority based upon a sort of patri-a. potestas, 
whereby the president was supposed to combine in his versatile 
personality the functions of a father with those of an inquisi- 
tor and policeman. We might also consider the higher esti- 
mate which is placed upon athletics as a means of physical edu- 



WILLIAM CAREY MOREY 53 

cation, and as a kind of safety-valve preventing tlie explosion 
of surplus vitality in the form of unexpected and unique ex- 
hibitions of enthusiasm not always suggestive of the most ad- 
vanced stage of civilization. We might finally consider the 
new moral forces which have resulted from the formation 
of student associations, secular and religious, and which have 
come to be a strong co-operative influence in the creation of 
higher moral ideals and a higher standard of college life. But 
it would hardly be consistent with my purpose to dwell more 
fully upon the special features of the great educational move- 
ment which has been in progress since the establishment of this 
institution. Sufficient perhaps has been said to indicate, or 
at least to suggest, its general significance and tendencies, and 
the important transformations it has effected in the system of 
higher education in this country. 

It is worthy of remark that this movement has been, as 
every movement conducted by liberally educated men should be, 
both progressive and conservative. It can scarcely be claimed 
by anyone that the expansion of the college curriculum, the 
introduction of the voluntary system, or the adoption of 
new methods of instruction and discipline, has resulted in de- 
stroying any of the elements of the old system which possessed 
a real and permanent value. Latin, Greek and mathematics 
have not been crowded from the course; but have probably ac- 
quired a new and more intelligent appreciation by being brought 
into comparison with other studies, and by being compelled to 
show that their high educational value is based upon rational 
and not merely upon traditional grounds. It is also worthy of 
remark that the dangers which almost always attend a transi- 
tional movement — those arising from the influence of extrem- 
ists and doctrinaires — have in great measure been avoided; 
and theoretical ideals have for the most part been kept in har- 
mony with real conditions and practical requirements. It is 
especially worthy of notice that the strong claims made in favor 
of scientific learning and of special training have not seriously 
affected the truth that a college education must be essentially 
a liberal education ; that the best and most efficient preparation 



54 HI8TOBICAI. ADDBX88 

to meet the varied responsibilities of life is that which is based 
upon the broad foundations of general enlrare; that while it 
is impossible in the present state of the world for anyone to 
'*take all knowledge for his province," and while eveiy man 
mtLst be, to a greater or less extent, a specialist, it is vet of tiie 
highest importance that every educated man have snch an appre- 
ciation of the relative dignity and value of the various brandies 
of human knowledge as will render him hospitable to all forms 
of truth, scientific as well as Kterary, historical as well as philo- 
sophical, empirical as well as metaphysical, secular as well as 
religious. \Miile it may be admitted that the early idea of a 
liberal education, as one limited chiefly to classical learning, 
may have been somewhat modified, the essential idea remains 
that a liberal education is a kind of training which brings one 
into sympathetic contact with the highest culture of the worid, 
and is itself liberalizing by creating in. the recipient a broad, 
sympathetic and liberal spirit. Indeed it may be said that the 
idea of a liberal education itseK has become liberalized; and 
has, by the reconciliation of opposrog views, resulted in the 
development of a system of training more comprehensive and 
thorough than that of any previous period- The important 
character and effects of this whole movement have perhaps not 
been overstated by President G. Stanley Hall, who in the '*Acad- 
emy" of 1891, expressed the opinion that "the last quarter of 
the century will be remarkable hereafter as the educational era 
in the worid's history." 

In considering the relation of the University of Rochester 
to the movement which has been thus generally described, we 
are called upon to make an inquiry which mav determine our 
estimate of the place which this institution is entitled to hold 
in the educational worii It is with no spirit of presumption 
that we seek to measure ourselves by the high standards 
which have been established during the brief period of our his- 
tory. It is rather with an honest desire to form an intelligent 
judgment as to the extent to which our University has fulfilled 
the mission proposed by its founders, and to which it has kept 
itself abreast of the intellectual progress of the times. In form- 



WILLIAM CAREY MOEEY 55 

ing this judgment we are fortunately not embarrassed by the 
fact that we are a small and not a large institution. It seems 
hardly necessary to say that size is not a criterion of success; 
and that an institution of learning is to be judged, not by its ma- 
terial dimensions, but by its spirit and life. As growth is re- 
vealed in the continual adjustment to a changing environment, 
so the progress of an educational institution is evident from its 
adjustment to the new intellectual and social requirements of 
the world of thought and action, and the extent to which it re- 
flects in its own history the advancement of the age to which it 
belongs. 

As we look back over the general movement which we have 
attempted to trace, we may distinguish three stages of progress, 
— a period of discontent, a period of controversy, and a period 
of fruition. At first there appeared a marked and growing 
dissatisfaction with the existing system; then, the claims of 
conflicting parties were critically examined and sifted; and 
finally, the benefits resulting from the interaction of conserva- 
tive and progressive tendencies were appropriated and utilized. 

The University of Kochester was bom in the period of dis- 
content. It was because certain friends of higher education 
shared in the growing spirit of discontent that they were led to 
break away from the fetters which had bound them to a tradi- 
tional system. It was a sense of dissatisfaction that caused 
them to throw ofi' the restraints of an old curriculum, which 
seemed to be framed chiefly for the needs of a particular class. 
It was the same spirit also that led them to remove from a spot, 
delightful in its seclusion, but apparently separated from the 
busy life and activities of the world. But in seeking a new 
field of educational work, these men found themselves beset 
with peculiar difficulties. It became their duty to establish 
faith in a period of general distrust, to create while others were 
engaged in criticism. The peculiar embarrassments by which 
they were surrounded at this time and the great wisdom which 
marked their initial work, are set forth in a contemporaneous 
document, which has fortunately been preserved to us. If 
we consider the time at which it was written, the unsettled state 



56 HISTORICAL ADDRESS 

of the educational world, the complexity of the problems which 
it discusses, the intellectual grasp which it reveals, the compre- 
hensive plan which it lavs down for a system of higher educa- 
tion, this document will be seen to possess a value not surpassed 
by any other contemporaneous paper dealing with the educa- 
tional question. I refer to the Eeport of the Joint Committee 
appointed by the first Board of Trustees to lay out a new plan 
of instruction to be pursued in the collegiate department of this. 
University. This committee was composed of Robert Kelly, 
'William R. Williams, Frederick WTiittlesey, Chester Dewey^ 
Thomas J. Conant, Asahel C. Kendrick and John H. Raymond. 
Their report was submitted to the Board of Trustees and adopt- 
ed September 16th, 1850. 

This report is indeed interesting as setting forth the views of 
a body of able, eminent and liberal-minded men, at a time when 
the educational world was in a state of criticism and unrest. 
It is also significant as indicating the earliest policy of the 
University, and the principles which were intended to guide it 
in its future development. But more than all it is significant 
as embodying a scheme of education which, in its conception 
and general outlines, in its effort to adapt a liberal culture to 
the demands of modern life, in its adjustment of conservative 
and progressive tendencies, marks the genesis of those more re- 
cent and more mature ideas which have finally been adopted 
after the agitation and experience of fifty years. It is of 
course impossible at this time to give an extended analysis of 
this Report. But cert^ain references to it seem necessary 
to show the earliest position assumed by this University 
in dealing with the educational problem. In describing the 
conditions existing in 1850 and in declaring their views with 
reference to these conditions, the Committee said : 

"The subject of college organization is one which, at the 
present moment, is accompanied with peculiar embarrassments. 
There is a feeling of disappointment prevailing, to a certain ex- 
tent, among educated men, as to the success of our colleges gener- 
ally, both with respect to the numbers w^ho attend them, and the 
results of the training imparted. Doubts have been instilled 



WILLIAM CAREY MOREY 57 

into the public mind as to the wisdom of the established systems 
and their adaptation to the wants of the present day. The 
whole subject of education, in all its stages and departments, i& 
undergoing an investigation such it has never before received. 

"It is with the consciousness of these difficulties, accompany- 
ing their task, that the Committee have devoted their most careful 
attention and best judgment to the consideration of the subject 
referred to them. Their desire has been to avoid all extremes, 
on the side either of Progress or Conservatism ; to accommodate 
the instruction, in the scheme to be recommended, as far as pos- 
sible to the present state of knowledge, the condition of society, 
and the present wants of the people ; and at the same time to re- 
tain all that has been proven, in the experience of the past, to be 
of primary importance." 

With such a grasp of the situation and with such a sense of 
their responsibility, these men set to work to organize a scheme 
of education which would conserve the best results of the pasty 
which would recognize the demands of the present and which 
would present a goal for future attainment. As preliminary to 
the expression of their own views, they set at rest the specious 
objections urged by some, that a liberal education is not practi- 
cal and that colleges do not pay. They showed that mental and 
moral discipline cannot be useless in the school of experience; 
and that a system of higher education is not a commercial busi- 
ness. They examined the existing college system of the United 
States with reference to its merits and defects, and came to the 
following conclusions : 

"1. The system is, on the whole, admirably adapted as a 
means of intellectual training, and in its main characteristics 
should not be abandoned. The feature of systematic courses of 
instruction especially should be maintained, in order to secure 
even development and a fair amount of good general culture. 

"2. The range of studies is too restricted to meet the educa- 
tional wants of the people. The means of instruction in many 
useful and important branches are not provided. 

"3. Too many studies are crowded into one prescribed course. 
Some are not pursued so far as needed or desired. 



58 HISTOKICAL ADDRESS 

"4. The system is not managed ordinarily with proper vigor. 
Students are received in an improper state of preparation, and 
are admitted too young. A sufficiently strict method is not pur- 
sued with respect to their advancement during the course, and 
at the close they receive a degree which, in many cases, is not a 
badge of respectable scholarship." 

With these general conclusions regarding the existing system, 
the committee proceeded to outline a curriculum which should 
alike preser\^e the advantages of a classical training to those who 
desired it, and afTord the opportunity for a scientific training to 
those who wished such instruction. This plan involved a con- 
siderable enlargement of the traditional course, by the addition 
of the modern languages and the natural sciences, and the estab- 
lishment of a distinct scientific course. It also combined the 
principle of prescribed, or fundamental, studies with a limited 
freedom of election. All students were required to take a cer- 
tain amount of history and rhetoric, two years of mathematics 
and natui-al philosophy and a defined course in logic, mental, 
moral and political science, and the principles of jurisprudence. 
Those who selected the scientific course were permitted to sub- 
stitute the modern for the ancient languages during the first two 
years of the course; and during the last two years, to devote 
themselves mainly to scientific studies. Those who selected the 
classical course were required to take the ancient languages dur- 
ing the first two years, and during the last two years to elect 
scientific studies, and also, if they so desired, to substitute the 
modern for the ancient languages. In addition to this, students 
not candidates for a degree were permitted to pursue any studies 
of the curriculum, provided they showed the proper qualifica- 
tions to pursue them profitably. 

Xo one who has a knowledge of the educational conditions 
existing in the middle of the century can look over this scheme 
of studies without being impressed with its historical signifi- 
cance. It marks, in fact, the initial stage of a great reforma- 
tory movement. Its progressive features are quite as apparent 
and distinctive as its general conservative spirit. In its attempt 
to retain what had been proved to be valuable in the old system, 



WILLIAM CAREY MOREY 59 

and at the same time to provide some way to meet the new intel- 
lectual wants of the period, it might appear to have been drawn 
up during the last decade rather than half a century ago. It 
furnished an ideal, and that of a very modern type, which the 
college was expected to strive after, even though it did not imme- 
diately attain it. In its general conception, it was perhaps 
quite as far advanced as any system adopted in an American 
college at that time; and was evidently intended to place the 
University of Rochester, at its very beginning, in the rank of 
progressive institutions. The difficulty of immediately realiz- 
ing the hopes of the Board of Trustees grew out of the inade- 
quate funds of the institution, its meagre equipment and the 
limited number of its faculty of instruction. The first faculty 
appointed consisted of Asahel C. Kendrick, professor of the 
Greek language and literature; John F. Eichardson, professor 
of the Latin language and literature; John 11. Ra^Tnond, pro- 
fessor of history and belles-lettres ; Chester Dewey, professor of 
the natural sciences; and Samuel S.Greene,* professor of mathe- 
matics and natural philosophy. With this beginning the Uni- 
versity passed through the brief initial stage of its history, until 
the year 1853, when Martin B. Anderson entered upon his du- 
ties as the first regularly installed president. 

It was during the administration of President Anderson that 
the educational world fairly entered upon the period of contro- 
versy — the period in which the advocates of the old and the so- 
called ^'new education" earnestly asserted and defended their 
respective claims. This University had already committed it- 
self to a policy which sought the golden mean between the ex- 
tremes of progress and conservatism. The new president, by 
his nature and training, was quite disposed to follow the line of 
this judicious policy. We have not now to do with President 
Anderson's remarkable character and stalwart personality, but 
only with his relation to the educational movement of his day, 
and the status of the college under his administration. The 
extreme polemic attitude assumed by some of the advocates of 

* Professor Greene did not accept the appointment ; E. Peshino Smith served as 
acting: professor for one year, and Isaac F. Quinby assumed the professorship in 1851. 



60 HISTORICAL ADDRESS 

the new education led him to take the part of a defender of exist- 
ing systems, and to be regarded as pre-eminently a conservative^ 
He had the most exalted conception of the value of classical 
learning, and resisted every attempt to dethrone it from the higk 
position which he believed it should occupy in the college curri- 
culum. He also believed that the curriculum should be made 
up largely of a prescribed course, marked out by professional 
educators, and did not sympathize with the idea that a college 
student could acquire a liberal education by choosing whatever 
he saw fit. He furthermore believed that the American college 
was distinctively an American institution, and frowned upon 
any attempt to engraft upon it foreign ideas. 

But in spite of the conservatism which generally marked his. 
views and public utterances on the subject of education, there 
was still in President .Anderson's policy a large and positive 
progressive element. This was seen, in the first place, in his. 
ideas regarding the wide scope of a college training. With all 
his earnest and polemic zeal for the retention of the classics, he 
had a real sympathy with most of the achievements of modern 
science. Without breaking down the general lines established 
by experience, he sought to bring the student into contact with 
scientific truth. He recognized the fact that human knowledge 
covers the phenomena of mind and the phenomena of matter,, 
and that both forms of knowledge are essential to the liberal 
scholar. He was by no means content that a college training 
should be based exclusively upon Latin, Greek and mathematics ; 
but insisted that it should include also a considerable knowledge 
of the physical, natural and social sciences — of astronomy^ 
physics, chemistry, geology, zoology, history, politics, economics 
and jurisprudence. The comparatively wide range of studies 
which he sought to introduce into the curriculum, in addition to 
the traditional course, placed him in general harmony with the 
progressive educators of the country. But he had no patience 
with the elective system as usually understood. Instead of exV 
panding the course by the introduction and multiplication of 
special elective studies — which in his view overburdened the cur- 
riculum, catered to professionalism, and made the judgment of 



WILLIAM CAKEY MOKEY 61 

the immature student more important than that of the experi- 
vcnced educator — he was of the opinion that the only practical 
way of enlarging the course was by judiciously selecting from 
the wide range of knowledge those studies which were illustra- 
tive of general laws and principles, and leaving the study of de- 
tails to the technical schools. 

Another progressive element in President Anderson's policy 
is apparent in some of the principles that he advocated in regard 
to methods of instruction. While he himself usually ap- 
peared as one having authority and expressed his opinions in the 
most dogmatic form, he still believed that the class-room was es- 
sentially a place for discussion. He encouraged the asking of 
•questions; he believed in the interest incident to debate; he 
thought that a recitation was hardly a success unless the stu- 
dents left the room, to use his own expression, "red in the face" 
with excitement. This method of rousing interest by encourag- 
ing a spirit of inquiry he was usually able to impart to his col- 
leagues, and it became a characteristic feature of the college in- 
struction. He also encouraged a method of training which 
tended in a certain degree to specialize the subject taught, and 
to encourage the spirit of independent investigation on the part 
of the student. This was accomplished by assigning to different 
members of the class particular topics, which were made the sub- 
ject of special reading and study, and presented in the form of 
what was called "class-room dissertations.'^ These disserta- 
tions, in connection with the discussions which usually accom- 
panied them^ had some of the features of the modern "semi- 
nary" method, and formed a most valuable adjunct to the work 
of instruction. 

But his theories regarding methods of instruction were char- 
acterized by certain more fundamental principles than those 
which merely affected the routine of the class-room. According 
to his view the method of bringing a subject within the compre- 
hension of the student is largely determined by the method in 
which it has already been brought within the comprehension of 
the instructor. He claimed, with Comte, that no subject can 
be thoroughly understood except through its history ; and hence 



62 HISTORICAL ADDRESS 

be believed tbat no subject can be tborougbly taught except 
through its genesis and historical development. To approach 
any subject through its historical growth not only gives a new 
view of its significance, but also brings it, he believed, into 
relation with the general culture of mankind, and affords a high- 
er appreciation of the intellectual attainments of the race. By 
the encouragement of the historical method of instruction, the 
sciences obtained a new interest and significance, and the teach- 
ing of the classics was almost revolutionized. In regard to the 
teaching of classical literatoire. President Anderson may be said 
to have advocated a kind of ^'higher criticism,'' in place of the 
technical, purely exegetical, "gerund-grinding" method, largely 
characteristic of the traditional system. He held that the liter- 
ature of Greece and Rome cannot be properly understood except 
as the exponent of Greek and Roman thought and civilization,, 
and hence should be interpreted in the light of the times that 
produced it, and in its relation to the literatures of other people. 
Instead of teaching literature to understand language, and lan- 
guage to understand grammar, grammar should be taught to in- 
terpret language, and language to interpret literature, and liter- 
ature to interpret the "world's growth toward mental and moral 
manhood." 

But the most distinctive and progressive feature in President 
Anderson's educational policy was probably his effort to bring 
education into harmony with life. This was professedly one of 
the great purposes kept in view by the advocates of the new edu- 
cation. A severe criticism which had been brought against the 
old system was that the colleges were estranged from the world, 
that the so-called liberal training afforded no adequate prepara- 
tion for the active duties of life, that the discipline of the coun- 
ter and the office was more beneficial than the discipline of the 
schools. President Anderson recognized the force of this ob- 
jection. "Much of the prejudice," he said, "with which higher 
education has to contend has arisen from the failure of scholars 
to develop the relation of their cherished pursuits to the life and 
movement of the passing age." His most earnest efforts were 
devoted to rescuing the cause of liberal education from the dis- 



WILLIAM CAKEY MOBEY 63 

repute into which it had fallen by its seeming indifference to 
worldly affairs and practical interests. He insisted that the 
principle of utility, in its highest sense, should be applied to all 
forms of liberal culture, and the most intimate relation should 
exist between men of thought and men of action, between science 
and life. ^'The profoundest lessons of the statesman, diplo- 
matist and financier," he said, "have been drawn from the rec- 
ords of the past, and embodied in critical editions of the Greek 
and Roman classics. . . . ^ot a sailor lifts his sextant 
from the unstable and slippery deck that with the aid of his 
nautical almanac he may measure the lunar distances that shall 
mark his pathway over the deep, who is not indebted to the as- 
siduous and constant cultivation of the higher astronomy." "It 
is with this view of the relation of theory to practice," he said, 
"of thought to action, of good learning and high science to the 
arts of life and practical ends, that we would retain among the 
means of liberal culture those permanent studies which form the 
groundwork of education, and constitute the basis of all those 
inquiries which, from the nature of their subject-matter, must 
always continue to be progressive, and hold a proximate relation 
to the practical interests of life." It is not merely as an expres- 
sion of his own personal views that I quote these statements, but 
as an indication of the spirit which, through his influence, 
largely inspired all the departments of college instruction. 

It must be evident that, while President Anderson was to a 
certain extent conservative in his general views and public utter- 
ances, he was yet progressive in his broad ideas regarding the 
scope of a liberal education, in his theories respecting meth- 
ods of instruction, and in his persistent claim that educa- 
tion should be kept in relation to the real demands of modern 
life. This union of the conservative and the progressive spirit 
left its impress upon the character of the college. While the 
studies hitherto approved by experience retained in great meas- 
ure their important place in the curriculum, new subjects of in- 
struction were introduced and new and distinct department's 
were organized. A greater importance was given to the modern 
languages. Chemistry was elevated into a distinct branch of in- 



64 HISTORICAL ADDRESS 

struction and a new laboratory was erected with, modern appli- 
ances for illustrating analytical and synthetical processes. 
Physics, under the title of ^^natural philosophy," was separated 
from mathematics, and each was made a distinct department. 
Geology received its proper recognition as an independent sci- 
ence. History, which had previously been taught successively 
by the professors of rhetoric, of philosophy, of mathematics and 
of Latin, was given a distinct place in the list of departments. 
In addition to this, new subjects were introduced in the form of 
special lectures, and three or four electives were permitted which, 
could not find a place in the prescribed course. 

President Anderson built upon the wise foundations laid by 
his predecessors ; and under bis influence the University became 
an institution characterized by broad and practical scholarship. 
Its graduates became kno^vn as men of vigorous minds, of liberal 
views and of practical sense, capable of adjusting themselves to 
the work of the world. The University was brought into cor- 
dial relations with the community at large ; and persons of what- 
■ever color, class or religious persuasion, found a hospitable re- 
ception within its walls. The liberal policy of the founders was 
preserved — that the University should be in fact what it pro- 
fessed to be in name, a seat of liberal culture, and not a center 
from which to promote denominational interests. This idea 
President Anderson strongly enforced; and upon this idea he 
appealed for the sympathy and financial support of the whole 
community. "We would have this University so organized,'^ 
be said, "and administered upon such principles, that it shall 
command the confidence and support of all patriots and all 
lovers of good learning. Christians of different names have 
generously contributed to its funds, and labored for its prosper- 
ity in the board of Trustees and Faculty of instruction. This 
University was dedicated at its foundation to the great cause of 
Christian education. For this end its founders gave their prop- 
erty, their labor and their thought. They thus gave the strong- 
-est pledges that they had in view no end which should not com- 
mand the hearty co-operation of all who desire' the elevation of 
man, and the prevalence of our holy religion." 



WILLIAM CAKEY MOREY 65 

During the whole period of his administration, the president 
was so identified with the institution that it was often said that 
President Anderson was the University. So predominant was 
his personality and so peryasive was his influence, that whatever 
credit is due for the position and influence of the University is 
due in the largest measure to him; and, conversely, it is no in- 
justice to say, that if the University failed to place itself in per- 
fect harmony with the edmcational movement of the time, such 
failure must also be largely attributed to him. The opinions 
of his colleagues were generally in harmony with his own; but 
whether they were or not, his opinions prevailed. The unques- 
tioned supremacy of one man undoubtedly gave vigor and effi- 
ciency to the University ; but it was sometimes a mooted ques- 
tion among the friends of the institution, whether the college 
was keeping pace with the general advancement resulting from 
forty years of agitation and discussion. The flexible courses 
of elective studies which had been adopted in many American 
colleges, and which had evidently met the real educational 
wants of the American people, were not introduced to any ex- 
tent into this institution. Notwithstanding the breadth which 
had been given to the curriculum and the laudable efforts to 
follow the general policy of the founders in steering between the 
Scylla of conservatism and the Charybdis of reform, the course 
of college instruction became practically restricted to a single 
prescribed course. The scientific course, though formally re- 
tained, was pursued only by a very limited number of students ; 
and the degree of bachelor of science was thought to be not 
quite as honorable as that of bachelor of arts. The annual 
catalogue did not show any material increase in the yearly at- 
tendance ; and the moral support and financial aid given to the 
University by the city of Rochester and the people of western 
!N'ew York was not in the highest degree gratifying. The work 
of President Anderson, great and important as it certainly was, 
was evidently not to be a finality. He had courageously and 
faithfully performed his work in defending truth and combat- 
ting error — a work necessary to be done during the controver- 
sial period of the educational movement. But the period of 
5 



^Q HISTORICAL ADDEESS 

controversy, distinguished as it had been by heroic leadership 
and the stalwart defense of established principles, at length drew 
to a close, and the period of fruition was ushered in with the 
administration of David Jayne Hill. 

It is unnecessary, and it would be far from my purpose,, 
either to compare or to contrast the personal qualities of the first 
and second presidents of the college. Their distinctive traits of 
character must here be left out of account, except as they relate- 
to the educational movement which covers the period of our in- 
stitutional history. It is enough to say that the appearance of 
a young man, of modest mien, of fine tastes, of liberal culture,, 
of an open conscientious mind, more desirous "to be right than 
to be president," considerate of the views of others, and willing 
to share his duties with others, tended to excite a general inter- 
est and to broaden the sense of responsibility. It became evi- 
dent that the success of the institution must depend upon the 
hearty and active co-operation of all those who were interested 
in its welfare — trustees, faculty, alumni, and the community at 
large. It is to the high credit of President Hill that he clearly 
perceived this fact, and appealed alike to his coUeag-ues and con- 
stituents for aid and support. He made it evident that every 
one must have something to do in maintaining the college, and in 
keeping it abreast of the times. 

The main controversy of the past generation had, as we have 
seen, been fought over the college curriculum; and the doubt 
had been expressed whether Rochester was keeping pace with 
the advance movement. The Faculty w^ere keenly conscious of 
the defects of the existing course of study, and at once took the 
initiative by appointing a committee to review the whole ques- 
tion of the reform of the curriculum, and to recommend a defi- 
nite plan of re-organization. The responsibility was thus as- 
sumed by the Faculty — perhaps for the first time in its history 
— of deciding a question of educational policy. From the re- 
port of the committee there was evolved a new curriculum, 
which, although it imposed new burdens upon the instructors, 
was unanimously adopted, and which presented a range of stud- 
ies more extensive and more advanced than had previously been 
offered. 



WILLIAM CARET MOREY 6T 

As the result of this re-organization a distinction wa& 
made between the following courses : The classical course, 
leading to the degree of bachelor of arts ; the scientific course^ 
terminating in the degree of bachelor of science; and literary 
courses, for which the new degree of bachelor of philosophy was> 
soon afterward given. A distinction was also made between 
prescribed studies, which were required of all and elective 
studies, which were open to the student's free choice. All 
studies were required until the third term of the Sophomore 
year, when four electives were offered ; and the number of such 
electives was increased until the close of the Senior year — in- 
cluding during the last two years about fifty elective subjects. 
From these electives each student chose about one-third of the 
studies of his entire course. This reform of the curriculum 
brought the college, so far as its course of study was concerned, 
into practical harmony with the more advanced institutions of 
the country. Following this, the old custom of granting the 
second degree in course, which had hitherto been conferred upon 
any graduate of three years' standing who desired it, was abol- 
ished; and advanced courses were laid out in each department, 
an examination in a certain number of which was a condition 
of receiving the master's degree. 'New departments of instruc- 
tion were also established, the most important of which was 
that of Biology, in which students were admitted to new scien- 
tific fields, receiving special instruction in the facts and laws 
of biological evolution by the use of the microscope and other 
instruments of the lalwratory. A separate department of 
Physics and practical Mechanics was also created, giving more 
specific instruction than had ever been given before in the laws 
of mechanical force and their industrial applications. Astron- 
omy was separated from the department of Mathematics; and 
the study of the English language and literature received a more 
distinct recognition. The specialization of these departments 
afforded a more special and thorough study of these sub- 
jects than was possible under the previous organization. 
But it may be of interest to say that the introduction of a large 
number of elective studies, and the establishment of new scien- 



68 HISTORICAL ADDRESS 

tiiic departments did not destroy tlie appreciation of the 
classics, but gave a new impulse to their more thorough treat- 
ment. It may be said in general that the modified system tend- 
ed to elevate the standard of scholarship in all the departments, 
to arouse a new intellectual interest in the students, and to give 
a reality to college training which did not, and could not, exist 
under the old traditional system and methods. 

Another feature of the administration of President Hill 
which should not pass unnoticed, was the higher appreciation 
which was given to college athletics. The question of 
athletics now came to be, not a mere question of sport and recrea- 
tion, but one of physical education and moral discipline. It 
may be said that before this time athletics, such as it was, had 
really been a demoralizing infiuence, from a lack of interest and 
proper supervision on the part of the college authorities. To 
transform a demoralizing influence into an efficient aid to col- 
lege discipline was itself an important achievement, and resulted 
in the abandonment of many unsavory college traditions, and in 
the development of' a greater degree of cordiality between the 
government and the governed. But the appreciation given to 
athletics was only a part of a larger policy to bring the student- 
body into sympathetic relation with the college authorities, and 
to create the feeling that both were co-operating, in a common 
life, for the attainment of a common end ; and this was no insig- 
nificant feature of the prevailing movement throughout the 
country toward educational reform. When the sense of re- 
sponsibility for the reputation and success of the college was 
thrown from the shoulders of one man into the hands of many, 
there was also apparent a more active supervision on the part 
of the board of Trustees. To the president of the board, a 
man of broad views and scientific attainments, is chiefly due 
the credit of the creation of the new biological department, and 
of obtaining for it an instructor versed in the use of laboratory 
methods. The whole tendency of the new administration was 
thus to broaden the sense of responsibility, to organize more 
efficiently the active forces of the University, and to transform 
what had been, for the most part, a paternal government into 
something like a constitutional system. 



WILLIAM CAREY MOREY 69 

During the administration of President Hill it became nec- 
essary to make more clear the relation of the University to the 
community at large. President Anderson had, in his adminis- 
tration within the college and in his public utterances outside 
the college, continually emphasized the fact that the University 
had before it no end which could not command the hearty co- 
operation and cordial sympathy of all lovers of high learning 
without regard to class or creed. On account of some 
apparent misapprehension of the purpose of a liberal 
education in general, and of the policy of this insti- 
tution in particular. President Hill was called upon 
to express — not more distinctly, but more specifically 
— the relation of the University to the community for 
whose intellectual and moral benefit it was established. Presi- 
dent Hill made it clear, at least to the public at large, that an 
institution of liberal education is not established for its own 
sake, or for the exclusive benefit of any particular class, but 
for the improvement of society. The motive which justifies its 
establishment is not selfishness, but philanthropy. Its spirit 
is not ecclesiastical, but humanistic. While it is unqualifiedly 
proper for the Christian and philanthropic men belonging to 
the denomination which has been chiefly instrumental in found- 
ing such an institution to cherish the feeling of pride and to 
receive the highest honors for its establishment; and while it is 
also unqualifiedly proper for such an institution to remain un- 
der the general control of the denomination with which the ma- 
jority of its founders were identified, it is certainly inconsistent 
with its original and fundamental purpose to use its power and 
influence to promote the interests of any class, party or sect. 
To be a philanthropic institution, to be a seat of liberal culture, 
to be the center of a general intellectual and moral influence, 
its policy must not be determined by the special tenets of any 
body of men. Indeed the honor of the denomination which 
gave it birth is at stake, when the question arises whether it 
shall remain an institution of liberal culture, or shall become 
an agent of propagandism. These were the propositions — the 
truth of which can hardly be questioned by any liberal mind — 



70 HISTORICAL ADDRESS 

which formed the essential features of President HilFs mes- 
sage, so far as it referred to the relation which should exist be- 
tween the college and the community. The interesting discus- 
sion which attended the enunciation of these principles . was 
perhaps necessary to clarify the public mind as to the true re- 
lation which should exist between any institution of liberal 
education, which has been founded and is controlled by denomi- 
national influence, on the one side, "and, on the other side, the 
body of the people for whose benefit it has been created, and 
from whose resources it must derive the means for carrying 
forward its philanthropic work. 

The continued success of the college after the retire- 
ment of President Hill, showed how thorough had been 
the work of re-laying the institution upon what we have 
called a constitutional basis. If, as some one says, "the great 
function of government is to enable itself to be dispensed with," 
the success of this administration cannot be questioned; for 
the University continued to prosper and to progress for four 
years without a president. During the temporary administra- 
tion of Professor Lattimore, the college still retained all the 
progressive features which it had previously acquired. Under 
Professor Burton a much needed reform was effected in the 
beneficiary system, by which the privilege of free tuition was 
limited to the actually needy and most deserving students, and 
by which such students might cancel their obligations by serv- 
ices rendered to the University. The discipline of the college 
was improved by the organization of a general council to take 
control of all student organizations; and the erection of a new 
gymnasium will remain as a material and permanent monument 
of Professor Burton's wise and efficient administration. 

From this somewhat cursory sketch of the history of the 
University, considered with special reference to the progress of 
higher education during the last half century, it is evident that 
this institution has from its beginning combined in its policy 
the spirit of conservatism and the spirit of progress. In the 
period of discontent, when the prevailing educational system 
was subjected to the severest criticism, and the most serious 



WILLIAM CAREY MOKEY 71 

•doubts were expressed as to its value and efficiency, the found- 
ers of this University adopted a policy, which, in its general 
design, suggested a way of improvement, and outlined a defi- 
nite plan by which such improvement might be effected, and 
at the same time retained those features of the old system which 
experience had proved to have a real value. In the period of 
controversy, when the educational world was disturbed by the 
<3laims of contending parties, the University sought to main- 
tain the solid foundations of a liberal culture, and at the same 
time to adjust it to the practical needs of actual life and of 
the present age. In the period of fruition, when the results of 
tlie previous controversy were being gathered up and utilized, 
the University sought to appropriate whatever had been newly 
discovered and proved to possess a real educational worth. With- 
out abandoning its hold of the past, it has ever sought to place 
itself in harmony with the present. In this way the Univer- 
sity of Kochester may be said to reflect in its own history the 
great educational movement which has covered the period of its 
existence. Such a record is one of which all its friends may 
justly be proud. Its past achievements are a sufficient justifica- 
tion of its establishment, and its present condition is an ade- 
quate assurance of its future progress. 



The Past and the Future of the University in America 

The nnireisity has been called into existence bj tbe neoeasiij 
^vdiieh man feels to oonneet bis past witb his present and to 
kngthen ont his brief indifidnal span of life b j adding to it ihe 
life of tiie generaticHis ^at hsve gqne before him. In fact civil- 
ization means this addition of the past to ^le present, and the 
TmiTCisitj i£ its blossom and seed-pouch wherein it realises its 
life in its foDest extoit. For it sees the liTing prLnciple of its 
eirilizadon and it sees how this has been realized in the events 
of tiie past and the presoiL It understands to a measDrafale de- 
gree how tiie present has ocmie to be and it can measure its real- 
izadon hy the ideal of the entire movement. 

Elementazj ediieatifm can begin this procesg. It can ocmi- 
menee an inventcHj of the £aeto and events of the present time. 
It can do a UttJe of tiie work of acq[iiiriiig a knowledge of the 
tediniqoe hy wiaxh. men hare learned to es^lain these elements 
of the d^ieiience of to-day. It can leam the resahs of human 
^MHig^ but can not ^aee out all ihe steps of ^he me(Siod by 
whidL the r^nltB have been reached. Elementaiy edoeatian 
deals mostLj with things and events with a s up erficial seilii^ of 
forces and causes, wiiile secondary educati<m, such as is given in 
our academies and hi^ sdiools to youth fnnn fourteen to ei^t- 
teen years of agie, gives more attenticm to tiiese forces and causes 
tiiat I have mentioned. It places less stre^ on the mere inven- 
tory and more stress on the process. Seocmdaiy education di- 
rects the attenti<m to the dynamic element — the forces and 
causes vdiich have produced the present, while dementary educa- 
tion begins widi the dead results and does not get mudi beyond 
ihem, aldioug^ it Inwvcly struggles towards 1^ apprehension of 
causes. Thus elementary education may be said to leam tiie 
nouns or substantives of our world, while secondary education 
studies the vrabs whidi egress the funetHms of our world. 



WILLIAM TORREY HARRIS 7S- 

Higher education studies for its main object all these things 
in relation to the purposes of life. It deals again with invento- 
ries of facts ^nd events, but only to see in them their trend 
toward the great moral purposes of life. It studies forces and 
causes, too, with the same intent. 

The facts and events of our present experience seen without 
their causes do not form in the aggregate a rational spectacle 
for the mind, ^or do the forces and causes which secondary 
education investigates reveal an ethical purpose, or explain the 
problem of life. Thej show a network of relations but not a 
world-reason — not a higher unity. 

It is higher education alone that gives its chief attention tO' 
the unity of facts and events, forces and causes in one whole 
and reveals an ethical purpose. It alone aims to give the intel- 
lect an insight into the final purpose of nature and man. Hence- 
its purpose is regulative and it gives a guide for the conduct of 
life, a practical knowledge of motives for action and of ideals to 
be striven for. 

This is a somewhat abstract statement of the functions of 
school education. In the popular consciousness, however, this 
comprehensive principle will be found broken up into frag- 
ments, so to speak, — -instead of one principle of utility, a thou- 
sand special applications of utility : one youth (or his parents) 
desiring a college education because it opens the road to a profes- 
sion, — law, medicine or divinity, — or to some form of engineer- 
ing, or to a position as teacher; another youth wishing to pre- 
pare himself for scientific investigation or for the study of his- 
tory or philosophy ; still another for the directive power such an 
education gives one ; still another for the entree given by it into 
the higher castes of society. In England a man may belong to 
the caste of gentleman by birth, or by title conferred for emi- 
nent services, or simply by the fact of having graduated from 
one of its universities. Or, finally, a youth may seek higher 
education for the sake of the more general reason of the desire 
for culture, the aspiration to master the wisdom of the race and 
to know oneself. 

That these motives are growing more active in our national 



74 THE UAIVKKSITY EN" AVTiRTCA 

life is an occasion for congramlarion to us who celebrate here an 
epoch in the histoiy of an institution of higher education. We 
rejoice to know that in an age of increased production of wealth 
and of apparent devotion to monev and the conquest of nature, 
there is shown an increase in zeal for education of aU. kinds and 
especially for higher education. 

The statistics show tliat within thirty years the number of 
students attending colleges and universities, including the regu- 
lar four years' course and post-graduate work, has not merely 
kept pace with the growth of the population but gained upon it 
so much that where in IS 72 there were 59 college students in a 
population of a hundred thousand souls there are now 
127, or more than two and one-sixth time^ as many. 
This is partly due to the recent establishment of women's 
colleges, but, omitting that part of the enrollment, the in- 
crease is from 54 to 95 students in each hundred thousand of 
the population. It seems that increase of wealth in the commu- 
nity is accompanied by increase of smdents in colleges and uni- 
versities. 

This leaves out of view the statistics of professional schools 
and technical sdiools in the United States, While the enroll- 
ment in ihe colleges and universities in the regular course is 
doubling every twenty-five years, the number in the professional 
schools of the country has increased from thirty to seventy-five 
for each hundred thousand inhabitants for students of law, 
medicine and divinity ; and students in science and technology 
have doubled in eleven years. 

All this has happened while the standard has been made 
higher and the tests made more strict. For during the past 
liiirty years the influence of Harvard University has prevailed 
to raise the 'standard of admission to college a year or even in 
many cases a year and a haK above the standard of 1870. 

Meanwhile ihe number of students in the secondary schools 
has increased proportionately. The grand cause of this has 
been the provision of free high schools in cities and lai^ vil- 
lages. In 1876 there were only 415 in each one hundred thou- 
sand of the population in attendance upon academies and high 



WILLIAM TOEEEY HARRIS 75 

schools, counting in also the preparatory departments of colleges ; 
this 415 had increased by 1899 to 896 in each hundred thou- 
sand. In 1890 there were reported 2,600 public high schools 
in the cities and large villages; in 1899 the number had in- 
creased to 5,700, notwithstanding some years of business pros- 
tration in the decade. 

How does this compare with higher education in Europe, — 
say with Germany ? 

It may be assumed that the students of the two highest years 
of the gymnasia should be added to the enrollment in the Ger- 
man universities in order to include all students of equal rank 
with those in the American colleges, universities and profes- 
sional schools. In 1899 there were about forty thousand (39,- 
901) students in the universities and about twenty-three thou- 
sand (22,830) students in the last two years of the gynmasial 
course. Adding the 15,912 students of the polytechnica we 
have a total of nearly eighty thousand (78,643) stu- 
dents in the German Empire, or 1,466 students to 
each million inhabitants, while there were in the United States 
2,369 in each million inhabitants. It is possible that the 903 
excess of American students over Germany in the million of in- 
habitants should be reduced by allowing more than two years 
work in the gymnasium as equal in grade to the average work 
of our colleges, but even if we allow three years it will still leave 
the number of American students of higher education in each 
million population larger by 600 than the same item in Ger- 
many. 

Besides this increase we have another occasion for congratula- 
tion. The amount of private benefactions for higher and sec- 
ondary education in the year 1898-99 as officially reported to 
the Bureau of Education was nearly twenty-three millions 
($22,692,030), of this enormous sura, less than one million 
was given to women's colleges and about the same sum to schools 
of technology, while to secondary education was given less than 
two millions. To found a university or a preparatory school 
or a library as a family monument is in good taste and, thanks 
to America's increase in wealth, is becoming more and more 
common. 



76 THE TNIVEESITY IN AMERICA 

Counting the enrollment of students in universities through- 
out the civilized world for the year 1898-99 we have a grand 
total of upwards of three hundred thousand (303,780). In 
this estimate the enrollment of our own colleges is reduced by 
subtracting the freshman and sophomore years, in order to count 
only the students that are fully equal to the standard of the Ger- 
man university. This gives a net total of 66,371 for the United 
States, the same being nearly one-fourth of all the students in 
higher education in the world. 

After this encouraging survey of the statistics of higher edu- 
cation which proves to us that our own country is in the van of 
a great world movement that seeks to bridge the gulf between the 
present and the past, let us now inquire more carefully into the 
method by which higher education preserves for us the lessons 
of the past, and extend our discussion even to an estimate of the 
actual net value of other times to our own. 

It will be acknowledged that the contents of human knowledge 
consist of two portions, one of which contains what we know 
of material nature, and the other what we know of human na- 
ture. The former contains matter and motion and physical 
forces and the latter human feelings, ideas and actions, both 
those of individuals and those of social aggregates. By far the 
most interesting to man is his relation to himself as species or 
social whole — his relation to himself as family, industrial so- 
ciety, state, and church. For man seems to have two selves, a 
self as individual and a self as institution. 

I have spoken of elementary education as giving only an 
inventory of things and events and some knowledge of the tools 
of thought that are required to make even such a crude inven- 
tory. These studies of the primary school, however, relate to 
nature and to man just as all school work ought to do even up 
to the university. Arithmetic, geography, English grammar, 
United States history, selections of literature, with partly me- 
chanical disciplines such as writing, spelling, dictation exer- 
cises, written numerical work, — all these give the child an abil- 
ity to use the printed page and to express for others his own ex- 
perience. The secondary school enlarges the mathematical view 



WILLIAM TORREY HARRIS 7T 

of nature, adding to arithmetic some knowledge of algebra, 
geometry and trigonometry; adding to his geographical knowl- 
edge some knowledge of biology, meteorology, geology, anthrop- 
ology and sociology ; adding again to his English graramar and 
literature the study of Latin, Greek, French and German, one 
or all. To the history of his native land it adds general history. 

Mathematics gives man a knowledge of the laws of na- 
ture as far as determined by the nature of space and time. 
Physiography shows how the elements of difference arise 
on the earth's surface, heights and depressions of land, water 
descending and ascending, and water collected in deep expanses ; 
the tilting of the strata making available the mineral treasures 
of the earth's crust; the varieties of climate and how caused; 
and finally the inventions of man by which he equalizes all these 
differences by connecting every place with other places by means 
of commerce and manufactures so that each man profits by the 
differences of the entire globe. 

The higher education of the college follows these lines: 
1. Mathematics, giving the laws valid for all matter and all 
force. 2. Physics, giving the study of the specific differences 
in matter and force. 3. Biology, treating of the laws of life 
in plant and animal. 4. History, studying the relations of in- 
stitutions to the individual and to one another. 5. Philology, 
showing the revelation made in language by each race of men. 
6. Literature and art, showing the process by which feelings 
become first ideas and convictions and then deeds among the 
several nations. 7. Logic, showing the structure of the reason- 
ing process and the method by which sense-perception is con- 
verted into scientific truth. 

It is interesting to note here that each modern nation counts 
among its higher studies the literature of the race from which it 
derived some important element of its civilization. The Chin- 
ese youth reads Confucius and Mencius and sees the universal 
type and model on which the Chinese world of to-day is formed. 
The Hindoo child listens to the stories of the Hitopadesa and if 
of a higher caste learns the Vedas and becomes conscious of the 
ideal principles of his caste system. The young Turk reads the 
Koran and comes to recognize the ordinances of his social life. 



78 THE UNIVERSITY IN AMERICA 

The Latin language is by common consent an essential part 
of higher education as conducted in the colleges, universities, 
professional and technical schools of the United States. Most 
of these institutions require the study of Latin in the secondary 
or preparatory schools which fit pupils for admission to their 
course of study, statistics showing that public high schools and 
private academies teach Latin to one-half of all their pupils. 
In fact the number studying Latin is much larger than the num- 
ber fitting for college or higher institutions, showing a convic- 
tion in the minds of the people that Latin is not merely an orna- 
mental study but a useful study. The total number of pupils, 
in the public high schools of the United States was, for 1899, 
476,227. The number studying Latin was 239,981, or more 
than 50 per cent, of the entire number, ^ine years before, the 
number studying Latin was less than 35 per cent. Thus the 
proportion of pupils taking Latin had increased nearly 50' per- 
cent, within a very short period. In the private academies and. 
preparatory schools giving secondary instruction the total num- 
ber of pupils for the same year was 103,838. Of these 51,714 
were studying Latin, or nearly 50 per cent, of the entire number.. 
This number increases year by year. 

But the revival of the study of Latin has extended also to the- 
elementary course of instruction, which includes the first eight 
years of school work, or, loosely stated, the pupils from six to 
fourteen years of age. An active movement has begun in later 
years to give a portion of these first eight years to the study of 
Latin, and a large number of schools now commence Latin in the 
eighth year of the course and some of them begin the study of 
Latin either in the eighth or the seventh year : and six towns of 
Massachusetts are reported in 1897 as pursuing the study of 
Latin either in the eighth or the seventh and eighth years. 

To the countries using the romance languages, — France,, 
Spain, Portugal, and Italy, — this revival of the study of Latin 
may seem strange, but it is easily explained when one considers 
the composition of the English language, which, though Ger- 
manic or Teutonic in its colloquial vocabulary and in its gram- 
matical structure, nevertheless resorts to the Latin and Greek 



WILLIAM TOREET HARRIS 79 

for all of its technical words and for all those words which ex- 
press fine distinctions of thought or subtle shades of sentiment. 
Any large dictionary of English includes in its vocabulary three 
words of Latin or Greek origin out of every four. While good 
English contains comparatively few of these Latin and Greek 
terms on a printed page, — rarely more than from 10 to 16 per 
cent., — yet it will be found that whatever is precise and tech- 
nical in expression, as well as whatever contains fine discrimina- 
tions of thought or delicate shades of feeling is expressed in 
w^ords of Latin origin. 

Hence the people who speak English have a specific reason 
for founding their secondary and higher studies of language on 
the Latin tongue. In order to understand and use with propri- 
ety a technical term or a word expressing fine discrimination, it 
is necessary to understand the colloquial word which corre- 
sponds to it ; this is generally a word denoting things or events 
perceivable by the senses. The word for the sense-object is 
taken figuratively for the intellectual object. Technical terms 
in the English language are drier and less significant to the per- 
son unacquainted with Latin than the technical terms of the 
German langTiage to a German, or those of the Erench language 
to a Frenchman, because the uneducated Englishman does not 
know the literal or colloquial meaning of the words used figura- 
tively. The illiterate German understands the word ^^Wissen- 
schaft" because he recognizes the word "wissen" in it which he 
uses every day to express the act of knowing ; but the English- 
man uses the word ^^science" and can not recognize in it the root 
"sci," which means to know, unless he is acquainted with Latin. 
For although he uses the word "knowledge" corresponding to 
the word "Wissenschaft" in its composition, yet he makes a tech- 
nical distinction between the words "knowledge" and "science." 
A little study of Latin, such as is given in the high schools and 
academies, is therefore very useful to the English thinker, be- 
cause it enables him to use with certainty and precision the 
words which express the results of careful thinking. 

In a broader sense, however, Latin is essential to secondary 
and higher education for all European peoples, in fact for all 



so THE UNIYERSITT IN AMERICA 

the people which have derived their civilization from the Ro- 
mans. It is found that in all the modem languages of Europe 
the distinctions of thought regarding the acquirement and trans- 
fer of property, and the formation of individuals into corpora- 
tions for municipal or for business purposes, are of Latin deriv- 
ation. A lawyer who did not give some attention to the study 
of Latin would get very little insight into jurisprudence. He 
would find himself embarrassed in using its technical terms. 
The people other than law}^ers who had pursued a course of 
study from which Latin had been omitted would have little in- 
sight into the trend of their civilization. They could not expect 
to understand the present issues if they had no insight into the 
history of the development of those issues. 

Students who have paid most attention to the course of study 
in academies and colleges have been impressed with the peculiar 
value of the Latin language as a branch of study for English- 
speaking peoples. They have taken note of the difference be- 
tween the colloquial vocabulary and the vocabulary used for the 
expression of elevated thoughts or sentiments and have im.der- 
stood the peculiar reason why Latin is so important in the 
schools of England and the L'nited States. They have also 
taken note of the general reason which makes Latin essential to 
higher studies in all modem ci\'ilized countries. The language 
of the Romans is the language of the political and civil organiza- 
tion of individuals into institutions, and these constitute our 
civilization. Eor the most part, the words expressing civil and 
political relations in all the languages of Europe are Latin. 

Schopenhauer said that "A man who does not underst-and 
Latin, is like one who walks through a beautiful region in a fog ; 
his horizon is very close to him. He sees only the nearest things 
clearly, and a few steps away from him, the outlines of every- 
thing becomes indistinct or wholly lost. But the horizon of 
the Latin scholar extends far and wide through the centuries of 
modem history, the middle ages and antiquity." 

One may say that of a himdred boys, fifty of whom had 
studied Latin for a period of six months, while the other fifty 
had never studied Latin at all, the fifty with the smattering of 



WILLIAM TORREY HARRIS 81 

Latin would possess some slight impulse towards analyzing the 
legal and political view of human life, and surpass the other 
aitj in this direction. Placed on a distant frontier, with the 
task of building a new civilization, the fifty with the smattering 
of Latin would furnish law makers and political rulers, legisla- 
tors, and builders of the state. 

In the same way, a smattering of Greek, through the subtle 
effect of the vocabulary and forms of Greek grammar, would 
give some slight impulse, not otherwise obtained, towards theo- 
retical or aesthetical contemplation of the world. On the high- 
est mountain ridge a pebble thrown into a rill may divide the 
tiny stream so that one portion of it shall descend a watershed 
and finally reach the Pacific ocean, while the other portion, fol- 
lowing its course, shall reach the Atlantic ocean. It requires 
only a small impulse to direct the attention of the immature 
mind of youth in any given direction. A direction once given, 
subsequent activity of the mind follows it as the line of least 
resistance, and it soon becomes a great power, or even what we 
may call a faculty. Certainly it follows that the busying of 
the mind of youth with one form or phase of Roman life will 
give it some impulse towards directing its view to the forms of 
the law. Or the occupation with the Greek language and life 
will communicate an impulse towards literary and philosophi- 
cal views of the world. 

Latin and Greek are the languages of the two peoples that 
hinge European civilization to Asiatic civilization. The spirit 
of Asia — the Oriental world — is not in favor of the individu- 
ality of man — neither in religion, nor politics, nor art, nor 
science. It has- an all-devouring primordial unity as deity 
(Brahm), which lacks the attributes of consciousness itself, and 
is hostile to any and all forms of human individuality. There 
is only despotism or irresponsible rule in the states of Asia ; only 
intellectual subordination in the Asiatic mind, and only the por- 
trayal of such subordination in Oriental art and literature. 

Greece and Rome form the entrance to the western civiliza- 
tion which unfolds individuality, and regards the human attri- 
butes as essentially divine and substantial. 



THE UNIVEBSITT IN AMERICA 



The Greek mind, iinder the purpose of Providence, develops 
and expresses free intellectual insight under the form of science,, 
and symbolizes freedom in all forms of art — ^gracefulness be- 
ing the appearance of freedom in material guise. 

The Greek mind has had this function so wholly to itself, that 
it is the source from whence the forms of theoretical insight are 
borrowed by all modern European peoples. Its sculpture, 
architecture, poetry (epic, dramatic, lyric), eloquence, history,. 
and the like, have furnished models for the modern world. If 
we have departed from those models in our highest reaches in 
literary art or science, it is rather by additions to the Greek 
original than by new foundations. 

The Greek mind furnishes us a sharp contrast to Asiatic ab- 
solutism and debasement of individuality. We feel at home 
with the Greeks when we come to them from a sojourn among 
Oriental nations. 

It will be acknowledged without dispute, that modem civili- 
zation is derivative, resting upon the ancient Roman civilization 
on the one hand, and on the Greek civilization on the other. 
All European civilization borrows from these two sources. To 
the Greek we owe the elementary standards of sesthetic art and 
literature. All culture, all taste, bases itself upon f amiKarity 
with Greek models. More than this, the flesh and blood of 
literature, the means of its expression, the vehicles in which 
elevated sentiment and ideal convictions are conveyed, largely 
consist of trope and metaphor derived from Greek mythology. 
Before science and the forms of reflection existed, the first 
method of seizing and expressing spiritual facts consisted of 
poetic metaphor and personification. Images of sense were 
taken in a double meaning — a material and a spiritual meaning 
in inseparable union. We, and all European nations — even 
the ancient Romans — are indebted to Greek genius for this 
elementary form of seizing and expressing the subtle, invisible 
forms of our common spiritual self-hood. One can never be 
at home in the realms of literature without an acquaintance 
with this original production of the Greek people. 

More than this, the Greek people, essentially a theoretically 



WILLIAM TORREY HARRIS 83 

inclined race, adA^anced themselves historically from this poetic 
personification of nature towards a more definite abstract seiz- 
ing of the same in scientific forms. With the Greek race 
theoretical reflection is also indigenous. The Greek language 
is specially adapted to this function, and in the time of the 
liistorical culmination of the Greek race appeared the philo- 
sophical thinkers who classified and formulated the great funda- 
mental divisions of the two worlds, — ^man and nature. All 
subsequent science among European peoples has followed in the 
wake of Greek science; availing itself of Greek insights and 
piously using the very technical designations invented by the 
Greek mind for the expression of those insights. 

The theoretical survey of the world in its two phases of de- 
velopment, sesthetical or literary, and reflective or scientific, is 
therefore Greek in its genesis ; and a clear consciousness of the 
details as well as of the entire scope of that side of our activ- 
ity, requires the use of the elementary facts that belong to the 
genesis or history of its development. A knowledge of Greek 
life and literature is a knowledge of the embryonic forms of 
this great and important factor in modern and all future civi- 
lization. 

The study of the classics forms one of the bridges by which 
higher education connects the present with the past. Mathe- 
matics as a pure science may be said to connect us with the 
past, also. For it sums up for us the insights of the race on the 
subject of quantity, giving us the ability to read back into the 
past the motions of the celestial bodies and also prophetically 
to forecast them. The study of history is the study of man's 
social will. It has revealed itself on the great dial-plate of 
time. All science is a bridge from the present to the past which 
interprets facts by a principle. 

But the university includes, besides its culture-studies, also 
specialization. 

In the first days of higher education it was naturally believed 
that only the professional schools for law, medicine, and divin- 
ity needed a preparation in the college course. Now it is be- 
ginning to be seen that the most practical occupations, those 



.84: THE TTNTTEBSITY IN AMERICA 

for the pracurement of food, clotliing, and shelter, as well as 
those for the direction of social and political life, may be helped 
by the studies that lead to the A. B. degree as well as the special- 
izing post-graduate studies that lead to original combinations in 
industry and poKties. 

Post-graduate work thirty years ago had not fully seized the 
idea of original investigation. There was a dim idea that 
higher education should end as it had begun, namely, as a 
system of set lessons with text-books and recitations, that post- 
graduate work should be a contiriuation of undergraduate work. 
The idea of the laboratory for experiment and research and 
of the seminary and library for original investigations in his- 
tory, politics, archaeology, and sociology, has developed since 
that time for us. 

Other nations (one thinks especially of Germany) have had 
this for a longer period. The significance of this precious ad- 
dition to our system of education will become clear if we go over 
for ourselves some of the grounds which make higher education 
more useful and productive than elementary and secondary. 

It is obvious that the method of higlier education deals from 
first to last T\T.th a view of the world, a theory of the unity of 
nature and its purpose. See every fact in its group, — ^this is the 
scientific view. See every group of facts in the light of every 
other group, and you see the trend of the whole, and you possess 
a world-view. 

It is true that a world-view is one of the first things given to 
the child by the family. It is gi^'cn in the form of religion 
and x)n simple authority. But higher education has for its 
chief object the intellectual vision of the unity that makes the 
world an image of the divine Beason. That which was blind 
faith is to become intellectual and moral insight, as the result 
of the first part of higher education. But the second part of 
higher education includes post-graduate work for the degree 
of Ph. D. This second part of higher education is specialized 
work, with a view to form experts. It requires the student to 
perform experiments in the laboratory and to undertake re- 
searches in the library, and it accompanies these with round- 



WILLIAM TOKREY HARRIS 85 

table discussions called "seminaries." In tlie post-gradnat© 
work the student selects a province so narrow that he may ex- 
plore it thoroughly and add by original research some new piece 
of knowledge to the stock of human learning already extant. 
The number of advanced students taking this course for three 
years in laboratory or seminary work has increased in twenty- 
five years from 200 to 6,000. It is the work of the university 
proper, as contrasted with the academic or philosophic course 
of study lasting four years and leading to the degree of bachelor 
of arts. 

Dr. Charles F. Thwing, President of Western Reserve Uni- 
versity, a few years ago was at the pains to hit upon a novel 
method of comparing the college graduate with the rest of so- 
ciety. He took the six volumes of Appleton's Cyclopedia of 
American biography and counted the college graduates in its 
list of over 15,000 names. A little more than ene-third of all 
were discovered to be college men. A safe inference was that 
one out of ten thousand of the population who have not had 
a college education training has become of sufficient note to be 
selected for mention in a biographical dictionary, while one out 
of each forty of our college men finds his place there. The 
chance of the college man as compared with the non-college man 
is as 250 to 1 to become distinguished as a public man of some 
sort — soldier, naval officer, lawyer, statesman, clergyman, 
teacher, author, physician, artist, scientist, inventor, — in short, 
a man with directive power of some kind, able to combine mat- 
ter into a new and useful form, or to combine men in such a 
way as to reconcile their differences and produce a harmonious 
whole of endeavor. 

The lawyer, after working years and years over his cases, 
comes by and by to have Avhat is called a "legal mind," so that 
he sees at a glance, almost as by intuition, what the law will 
be in a new case. So, in the four years of college undergradu- 
ate life, the student gets an insight which aids him in thinking 
out a solution to the problem of life. He forms a habit of mind 
which inquires constantly of each thing and event : How does 
this look in the light of the whole of human learning ? What 



86 THE UNIVEESITY IX AMEKICA 

is the '^good form" which the corLsensus of the scholars of the 
world has fixed for this i He learns at once to suspect what 
are called ''isins" and universal panaceas as one-sided state- 
ments. The wisdom of the race begins to form a conscious ele- 
ment of his life. 

WTiile the first part of higher education gives this general 
insight into what is good form in view of the unity of human 
learning, the second part — that which teaches methods of orig- 
inal investigation — should be made accessible to all students of 
colleges and universities. For this purpose endowments are 
needed, first in the form of fellowships which will enable the 
student to live comfortably while he is preparing himself for 
his doctor's degree. A second kind of endowment may promote 
research and take the form of prizes for special investigations. 

The laboratories and seminaries of this post-graduate course 
may and do take up the practical problems of the life of the 
people. These are capable of immense benefit in sociology and 
politics, and in the iadustries of the people, rural and urban. 
The entire civil service of the United States should find em- 
ployment for experts armed with methods of original investiga- 
tion and \vith the readiness and daring to undertake the solu- 
tion of problems which ofier themselves perpetually in our civil 
life. The town council, the board of public works, the various 
directive powei*s which manage the affairs of the state and 
municipality are in constant need of light, and the student of 
the post-graduate department of the university is the person 
needed to furnish by his special studies the aggregate result of 
the experience of the world in answering these practical and 
theoretical wants. In a country studying new political ques- 
tions and new questions in sociology, the student who obtains 
his doctor's degree from the post-graduate course can apply his 
knowledge, and apply it rationally, without losing his self-pos- 
session. 

Since 1880, when our census showed a population of more 
than fifty millions, we have ascended above the horizon of the 
great nations of Europe. 

Henceforth we have a new problem, namely, to adjust our- 
selves to the European unity of civilization. We must 



WILLIAM TORREY HARRIS 87 

suppose that the problems of diplomacy which will arise in our 
relations to the states of the Old World can be best solved by 
minds trained in the university. For it is higher education which 
takes the student back to historic sources and descends with 
him from national beginnings, tracing the stream of events to 
the various points at which modem nations have arrested their 
development. Successful diplomacy is not possible without 
thorough knowledge not only of national policy but of national 
aspirations and their historic genesis. 

It is almost equally important that our home problems, 
social and political, shall be studied by our university specialists. 
Perpetual readjustment is before us. There is the new aristoc- 
racy of wealth struggling against the aristocracy of birth. To 
both is opposed the aristocracy of culture, the only one that is 
permanent. All may come into the aristocracy of culture, but 
it requires supreme endeavor on the part of the individuals. 

With the great inventions of the age we find ourselves all 
living on a border land. We are brought into contact with 
alien nationalities and alien forms of civilization. We are 
forever placed in antagonism with some environment, material 
or spiritual, and our endeavor must perforce be to effect a 
reconciliation — to imite the conflicting ideas in a deeper one 
that conserves what is good in each. We must look to higher 
education to furnish the formulae for the solution of the prob- 
lems of our national life. 

The present age offers problems of combinations of nation 
with nation and of civilization with civilization, — problems 
which no age in the past could solve. A deeper knowledge of 
human nature was needed and that deeper knowledge we have 
reached in many of its particulars. 

The university of the future is to have this function of find- 
ing and expounding the principle that unites the contradictions 
of national ideas in one harmonious principle. In this great 
work the University of Kochester has during the past fifty 
years performed a great part in training the leaders of public 
opinion and the directors of affairs. In the coming fifty years 
may this institution be an influence upon this nation as benefi- 
<3ent as it has been in the past. 



The Evening Exercises of Semi-centennial Day' 



OPENING ADDEESS 
Hon. David Jatne Hilij, LL. D. 

Wlien Daniel Webster appeared as advocate In the famous- 
Dartmoutli College case, he said of that institution, of which he 
was a graduate, "It is a small college, but there are those who- 
love it." He appeared as the defender of private educational 
foundations, and to resist the acts of the N^ew Hampshire legis- 
lature in expropriating the college and converting it to the uses 
of the State. Since Webster's day, though he won his case and 
settled the law upon the subject, the current of public opinion 
has gone against many of his views, and education has tended 
to become a public function rather than a private enterprise. 
This transformation, which is no doubt justified by adequate 
reasons, has, nevertheless, one serious disadvantage, — the tend- 
ency to eliminate personality from the educational process. 
In the old days of college life in our country, a few professors,, 
usually representing the totality of a liberal culture, came into- 
intimate relations with a few students whose whole life was. 
committed to their charge. A relation truly paternal and sen- 
timents truly filial made it possible for graduates to "love" the 
college home in which they had passed the freest and happiest 
days of their existence. But in these latter times, the imper- 
sonal organization of modern universities, the infrequent points 
of contact between professors and students, the great numbers 
brought together in one place, each devoted to special studies- 
and bent upon divergent purposes, almost exclude that cultiva- 
tion of the personal affections which must ever constitute the 
most delightful experience of college life. 

It is chiefly in the smaller colleges that this charm of close 
companionship still lingers. To hundreds of the graduates of 
the University of Eochester the name of their Alma Mater re- 

• The following abstracts of the addresses on the evening of Semi-centennial Dar 
are derived either from the stenographic report of the exercises of the evening, or from, 
manuscript copies of the addresses, furnished by the speakers. 



DAVID JATNE HILL 89 

calls more vividly than any other memory the noble figure of 
President Anderson, always impressive and commanding, irre- 
sistibly driving his energetic moral convictions and his indi- 
vidual philosophic conceptions into the minds of his students, 
not only in the chapel and the class-room, but everywhere, on 
the campus, in the street, under the vines on his porch in the 
cool of the evening, living and dying to "create a soul under the 
ribs of death" in every plastic human creature that came with- 
in reach of his magnetic influence. And next to this image of 
college days in Eochester there lives, secure in its own secret 
hiding place in the heart of every older alumnus, the serene 
presence of that princely scholar. Professor Kendrick, who 
poured out with lavish hand at the feet of the little circle that 
pressed round his desk as round the tripod of Apollo, the rich 
learning of ancient Greece, mingled with whole cantos of Lord 
Byron and lyrics of Tom Moore, when his soul was fired by 
that light of genius that has made all literature one world and 
ensphered that world with radiance in the mind of its inspired 
interpreter. 

IN^ever rich in the mere externals of educational equipment, 
and long denied the material facilities which generous friends 
have at length bestowed in larger measure, the University of 
Rochester, which now completes a half century of fruitful ex- 
istence, finds its chief glory in the work of the great and de- 
voted men by whom its faculty and corporation have been 
enriched. It has stood in a peculiar sense for manhood, which 
it has always striven to develop and crown with sound learning, 
high character and publi*c spirit. In an unusual degree it has 
cultivated the patriotism of its students, who, in every national 
crisis, under the inspiration of their teachers, have ever stood 
ready to serve their country. 

It is therefore into an atmosphere peculiarly congenial to his 
own nature that we welcome the first of the speakers who have 
honored us by their presence here this evening. It is with great 
pleasure that I have the honor to present to the audience one 
who has achieved distinction as a scholar, as an author, as a 
soldier, as a public servant, and above all as a man among men. 
His Excellency the Governor of the State of New York. 



Promise and Performance 

Hon. Theodore Roosevelt, LL. D. 

What I propose to impress upon you to-niglit is, in the first 
place, before making a promise think of what you are doing, 
of what you say you will do ; and, in the next place, do it. Each 
of us tends to think more or less of his own profession. Eor 
the time being my profession is politics, and what I am going 
to say to you has large reference to public life. Do not deceive 
yourselves. Do not think that in this republic, under this gov- 
ernment, which is a government of and by and for the people, 
that the people can hold themselves guiltless if the government 
goes wrong. It is an easy thing to try to make a scapegoat of 
others; it is an easy thing to try to save our own consciences 
when we have been guilty of shortcomings by seeking to lay 
the blame on others; it is an easy thing to say the people are 
sound, the fault lies only with the politicians ; but in the long 
run the government in a country like ours must respond to the 
will of the people. If you wish your government to be good, 
it will be good. You have it in your power to make it good, 
but you cannot make it good without trying. I do not mean 
that you should wish it at home in your own parlor. I do not 
mean that you should get together in little bodies once a year 
and wish that other people were as good as you. I mean that 
you should take the same trouble in regard to politics that you 
take in your own private affairs. 

Is it a credit to the men of education, to the men 
who have sufficient means to give them the little luxuries 
of life, that the actual hard work of politics should 
be done by those who make it a profession? Most 
emphatically, [N'o. Lowell said, you will remember, "Freedom 
is not a gift that tarries long mth cowards." It is true that 
liberty, real self-government, is not a gift that tarries long in 
the hands of supine, indifferent men, who do not care to take 



THEODORE ROOSEVELT 91 

the trouble to guard and keep that gift which has been given to 
them. In too many communities we see, on the one hand, the 
growth of a class that does not care for decency, and does care 
for viciousness, and on the other hand, the growth of a class of 
men caring for decency but in whom the tendency to achieve 
self-government has got into a state of atrophy, who seek to do 
what cannot be done, who follow to their own destruction fan- 
tastic theories, who demand the impossible good and yet permit 
to exist the bad which it is entirely possible to eradicate. 'Now 
that is the kind of thing I want to talk against. I want you 
to cultivate in yourselves the habit of demanding, not the im- 
possible, but the best possible, and then insisting that when a 
promise to do the best possible has been given, it shall be lived 
up to. 

Do not say, if you are a politician, that I am defending you 
for not doing what is straight. I am not. I am demanding 
that you should go straight. Do not say, on the other hand, 
that I am lowering the ideal. I am putting the ideal high, only 
I am demanding that wlien you -Q.X your eyes upon the stars 
you remember you have your feet on the earth. The best way 
to understand what I mean is to read history, to read of our 
great men as they actually did their work, and remember that 
they had to work with the implements that were ready at hand, 
but tried to do their work well with those implements. Now 
there never existed, and does not exist now, in the most corrupt, 
rotten city government in this country so hideous an evil as 
slavery was on the 4th day of March, 1861, when Abraham Lin- 
coln was inaugurated as president. He did not recommend on 
that day the abolition of slavery. Against the wishes of the 
extremists, he stood firm and inflexible, refusing to issue an 
emancipation proclamation until, after nearly two years had 
elapsed, the stern purpose and resolve of the people had been 
aroused. Consequently, when he promulgated his proclamation 
setting free the slaves on the first of January, 1863, he had the 
people of every loyal state behind him. Now at the time those 
who wished him to act more quickly denounced him as not hav- 
ing a sufficiently high ideal. They claimed they were better than 



92 PROMISE AND PERFORMANCE 

lie was. They were not ; tliev were more foolish that he was y 
that was all. i^ow you must face difticulties as Lincoln and 
3nen like him have faced the great difficulties of the past. You 
will not he excused if you fail to do the hest possible ; and, on 
the other hand, you are not to be excused if you fail to do any- 
thing because you do not think the best possible is really the 
best. 

See to it that you know what can be done; see to it that 
those who are your representatives say that they will do it, and 
then hold them to the sharpest accountability if they fail to 
make good their words. 'No man is to be excused if he does not 
do in office what he said he would do before he got into the 
office, and you have the right to make the closest, most careful 
scrutiny to see to his making good the promise, and to distrust 
any man that is not true to his promise, any man whose per- 
formance does not square with the promise. Do not seek to de- 
lude yourself with the thought that a part of the body politic 
can be corrupt and the rest be uncorrupted. Do not think that 
public life can be allowed to get rotten and private life remain 
what private life should be. I ask for virtue, for honesty, 
for decency; I ask for courage; I ask of you that practical 
common sense which will make decency, honesty, courage of 
avail in actual political life as they are of avail in private life. 



College Types and Traditions 

Professor Newton Lloyd Andrews, Ph.D., LL. D. 

It is my honorable part to bring you the special salutation of 
the mother University, and to join therewith the appreciative 
good wishes of every 'New York college. We recognize the im- 
portant part which the University of Rochester has had in the 
educational life of the state and the nation. In a half century 
than which no other has been more significant she has justified 
her right to be, not by duplicating the work of any other college, 
but by doing her own work, in her own way and in her own 
-spirit. Without this vigorous, self-respecting individuality, 
her existence would have been superfluous. 

The multiplication of institutions of higher learning is on 
the whole to be deprecated, unless each shall stand for something 
individual, distinctive, and characteristic in educational aims, 
methods and influences. A college, like a man, must have per- 
sonality. It is not a question of large or small institutions, 
but rather of diversity and variety in educational ideas. There 
is high value in complexity of intellectual life. We ought to 
discover in the general aspect of our cultured society, not the 
features of any one or any few universities, but rather to see 
a composite product representative of all, even as the white light 
is the synthesis of every prismatic color. 

A type is the realization of an idea. It presupposes poten- 
tiality, plastic force, environment. In actualizing your Roch- 
ester type, you have had young men for your material, the mar- 
velous potentiality of youth! The environment, not to speak 
of this goodly western l^ew York, has been this thriving city of 
Rochester, which more than fifty years ago had some sense of 
what a university would be worth to it, but could not foresee 
what its sympathies, its activities, its atmosphere would bo 
worth to this University. And if, as philosophers toll us, lx->th 



94 COLLEGE TYPES AXD TEADITIONS 

material and environmeiiT desire the actualizing idea, no such 
desire could have been more fortunately satisiied than in Mar- 
tin B. Anderson and his conception of education. A man of 
his time, at home in his age, a leader of men, he trained his 
pupils to knoTv their age, to be in touch with their time, to 
achieve leadership. *So college president ever more distinctly 
and successfully inspired in his students a broad sanity of in- 
tellectual and moral life. His accomplished successor contrib- 
uted new elements, while Gilmore and !Robinson, Mixer and 
Lattimore, Morey, Forbes and Burton, have shared with Ander- 
son and Hill in shaping your ideals. 

For college types there is no finality in aspect or function^ 
but as natural evolution carried forward into each higher stage 
the distinctive, net result of every earlier process, so may a 
■university grow unto many things, and gTOw out of some things^ 
but it will not leave behind any normal product of its real Hf e. 
Identity does not demand fixity, but it does involve continuity- 

Foremost of your traditions, therefore, supreme among the 
things given over to you, and which you will give over to others. 
is the organizing, assimilative, amplifying, yet persistent and 
ever identifiable university life. Precious recollections of 
honored teachers and cherished friends, memories grave and gay 
of studies and sports, of class-rooms and fraternity-halls, are 
tribut-ary to the great current. To value and transmit these 
traditions is more than fidelity to old associations. It is loyalty 
to the university. But what is- any university, in the solidarity 
of its presidents. professoK, and alumni through all generation? 
of its continuous life, but a series of runners, like those of old, 
each boimd to hand on his torch of truth, that superlative tradi- 
tion, not to any contented spectator, but to some swifter runner 
no less eager for the goal. 



The Founders of the University and the University 

they Founded 

Eev. EoBEET Stuabt MacAbthur, D. D., LL. D. 

The founders of the Universitj of Rochester were men of 
heroic mold, men of zeal, faith and power. It may not be cor- 
rect to say that they builded more wisely than they knew; 
they were men well qualified to know how wisely they builded. 
As we close the first half century of the history of this Univer- 
sity, these men are honored ; but their honor will increase as the- 
years multiply. 

As early as the year 1820, the Baptists of the State of 'New 
York established at Hamilton in Madison Coimty an institu- 
tion of learning. Its chief purpose was the education of young 
men who gave evidence of a call to the Christian ministry. In 
the course of time the objects and methods of instruction broad- 
ened, but, in the opinion of many, not to the degree necessary 
to furnish a general education as distinguished from that which 
was simply ministerial. It was also realized by many that 
Hamilton, as a small village and then comparatively inaccessi- 
ble, was an inappropriate site for such a college as the hour 
demanded and the denomination required. 

As the outcome of many deliberations, a determined effort 
was made in 1847 to remove Madison University from Hamil- 
ton to Rochester, and also to give the institution a broader edu- 
cational character and an endowment sufficiently large to en- 
able it to maintain that character. Heated controversies arose. 
Finally the legislature of the State authorized the removal of 
the institution to Rochester, as had been voted by its Board of 
Trustees, whose action was indorsed by a large convention of 
Baptists assembled in Albany in 1849. Many legal difficulties, 
however, soon arose, and it was finally agreed that the project 
of removal should be abandoned. Those who favored the re- 



96 THE FOUNDERS OF THE UNIVERSITY 

moval applied to the Board of Kegents of the Universitv of the 
State of Xew York for a charter for a new college to be estab- 
lished in Kochester. January 31, 1850, this application was 
granted on condition that within two years the sum of $130,000 
be raised for the new college. Heroic efforts were made to 
comply with this condition. On the 2nd of December of the 
same year evidence was furnished to the Eegents that this con- 
dition was fulfilled, and on Eebruary 14, 1851, the Eegents is- 
sued the charter under which the University was organized. 

The University of Eochester started as a broadly Christian 
institution of learning; no narrow denominational tenets ham- 
pered its methods of instruction or research. Under its char- 
ter a self-perpetuating Board of Trustees, twenty-four in num- 
ber, was created. They hold office for life, but may be removed 
for certain specified forms of neglect of duty. Twenty of the 
original trustees were Baptists. A few years ago, by a vote 
of the Board, the proportion of Baptists was made two-thirds 
of the Board. The University is thus under the control of one 
denomination, but it is not, in its faculty of instruction, in its 
students, nor in its teaching, in any narrow and sectarian sense 
denominational. It never was intended to be such; no college 
worthy of the name is denominational in that sense of the word. 
Eochester in this respect stands on the same broad basis as does 
the University of Chicago, imiversally recognized as one of the 
broadest of all American institutions of learning. For this 
broad culture and this universal faith, the University has ever 
stood, now stands and shall ever stand. 

The University was founded to do its part toward the gen- 
eral culture of the community. It could, therefore, ask the 
aid of men of all creeds. Like a trumpet the call for aid rang 
through the county of ]\Ionroe and the State of 'New York. 
Among the prominent men in Eochester and its vicinity who 
signed calls or who made pledges in the interest of the Univer- 
sity were: Henry E. Eochester, Addison Gardiner, William 
Pitkin, Frederick Whittlesey, Everard Peck, Elias Pond, Alex- 
ander Mann, Darius Perrin, Samuel D.Porter, Freeman Clarke, 
Levi A. Ward, Henry E. Selden, Jacob Gould, Henry 



ROBERT STUART MACARTHUR 97 

Cook, L. Ward Smith, William W. Ely, E. Peshine 
Smith, Isaac Butts, Samuel Hamilton, William H. Perkins, Eras- 
tus Shepard, Isaac Hills, Thomas Kempshall, F. W. Holland, A, 
J. Brackett, James B. Shaw, George F. Danforth, E. Darwin 
Smith. Five men started the agitation for the removal of 
Madison University to Rochester ; this action they took by sign- 
ing the address to the Baptists throughout the State. Their 
names are: David B. Barton, William ]^. Sage, Elon Hunt- 
ington, Henry W. Dean and Alvah Strong. Others in Roch- 
ester who were deeply interested in the project of removal were: 
Pharcellus Church, Oren Sage, Elijah F. Smith, Gideon W. 
Burbank, Ahira G. Fitch, Edwin Pancost, Justin A. Smith and 
Albert G. Smith. 'Near Rochester were such noble friends as 
Roswell S. Burrows, Velona R. Hotchkiss, Lemuel C. Paine 
and Rawson Harmon. In the eastern part of the State were 
men conspicuous alike in the commercial and political world 
who were friends of this movement ; among these were : John 
IN". Wilder, Ira Harris, Robert Kelly, William Kelly, William 
R. Williams, Friend Humphrey, Edward Bright, Sewall S. 
Cutting, William L. Marcy, B. S. Welch, Smith Sheldon, E. E. 
L. Taylor, J. S. Backus, R. R. Raymond, H. C. Fish, A. B. 
Cap well and George C. Baldwin. This is a truly noble group 
both of the laity and the clergy of many creeds. To be found 
in this list is an honor which any man might covet. 

The University and Seminary began their lives together, and 
for a time shared the same domicile. On the first Monday in 
i^ovember, 1850, they began their work in the building pre- 
viously known as the United States Hotel, on West Main 
Street, then called Buffalo Street. It was leased and hastily 
fitted up both as a lecture hall and dormitory. These certainly 
were humble beginnings, but they gave promise of greater 
things. Ralph Waldo Emerson once used the event as an illus- 
tration of Yankee enterprise, saying that "a landlord in Roches- 
ter had an old hotel which he thought would rent better as a 
university; so he put in a few books, sent for a coach-load of 
professors, bought some philosophical apparatus, and, by the 



98 THE FOUNDERS OF THE UNIVERSITY 

time green peas were ripe, had graduated a large class of stu- 
dents/' 

The coach-load of professors of whom Mr. Emerson spoke 
consisted of Thomas J. Conant, John E. Maginnis, Asahel C. 
Kendrick, John E. Eichardson and John H. Raymond. Dr. 
Maginnis became Professor of Biblical and Pastoral Theology, 
and Dr. Conant Professor of Biblical Criticism and Interpreta- 
tion in the Theological Seminary. The two institutions were 
then not so widely separated as they became in later days. In 
the University there were sixty-six students; in the Seminary 
twenty-four ; most of whom had come with their professors from 
Hamilton. 

It is fitting that fuller reference be made to the original pro- 
fessors ; indeed not to make such reference would be an unpar- 
donable omission. 

What shall I say of Dr. A. C. Kendrick ? Brilliant in wit, 
profound in learning, genial in soul, he combined noble quali- 
ties in his unique and superb manhood. To hear him read 
Greek, whether that of Homer, Plato, the tragic poets, or the 
"New Testament, was to be charmed, entranced and inspired by 
linguistic music. He was equally admired and loved. When 
he died in 1895, the world was made poorer in all its spheres 
and heaven richer in all its radiant glories. 

John Howard Raymond filled the chair of Rhetoric at Madi- 
son University from 1839, and accepted the professorship of 
Rhetoric and Belles-lettres in the University of Rochester at 
the time of its organization. His brilliant oratorical powers, 
rare rhetorical taste and winning social qualities admirably 
fitted him for this position. 

Those whose privilege it was to be pupils in Latin of Profes- 
sor John E. Richardson will hold him ever in honored memory. 
He was an enthusiast in his work. His students will never for- 
get the delight with which he taught the Roman method of pro- 
nouncing Latin. He had the honor of introducing this pronun- 
ciation, which is now almost universal in American colleges. 

The most conspicuous figure in the first faculty, in respect to 
age and distinction, was Chester Dewey, M. D., D. D., LL. D., 



ROBERT STUART MACARTHtJR 99 

Professor of Chemistrj and E'atural History. Dr. Dewey, as 
professor in Williams College and an academy principal in 
Pittsfield, Mass. and in Eochester, had been a lifelong student 
^nd teacher of the natural sciences, and the friend and associate 
of the great naturalists of the country. He brought to the new 
institution a broad acquaintance with science, varied experience 
in educational work and the elevating influence of an exception- 
ally noble character. 

Professor Albert H. Mixer has his place in thct first faculty, 
having been Tutor in History and Languages in 1850-52. In 
those days the instructors had to perform many kinds of work : 
and his varied scholarship and unusual versatility enabled him 
to be of special service in organizing the literary societies and 
doing other valuable work in that formative period in the his- 
tory of the University. 

Eeference should also be made to William ]^. Sage, who from 
the beginning was the Secretary-Treasurer and financial agent 
of the University, and who filled every position with eminent 
ability, marked sagacity and absolute honesty. The growth and 
prosperity of the institution have been greatly due to his skill, 
judgment and self-sacrificing labor. 

E'o mention has been made of Dr. Martin B. Anderson. He 
was not one of the founders but he was the chief former of all 
that has been distinctive in the spirit, history and work of the 
University. He was the soul of the college during all the years 
of his presidency. He was a unique man among the men of his 
day. He had no predecessor ; he can have no successor. Dif- 
ferent eras demand men of different type. The early history 
of this University is but the gray dawn of the morning ; we are 
now moving forward to its meridian splendor. The University, 
like the nation, has entered upon its new era, its era of expan- 
sion, its era of fuller success and brighter glory. With the com- 
ing of the new president, the increased enthusiasm of all its 
friends, the promise of great and speedy additions to its endow- 
ment and the admission to its class-rooms of the diviner sex, the 
new era has already auspiciously dawned. 

LofC. 



The City and the College 

Horu Geobge AiiExaxder Cabnahax 

A little more than fifty years ago a hot controversy was rag- 
ing among the friends and patrons of Madison University — 
a college which had then been established at Hamilton in this 
state for some thirty years — over the question whether the col- 
lege should be removed to Rochester. Finally, aft-er a long 
contest, a compromise was effected by which a new college was 
founded at Eochester, without destroying the old one at Hamil- 
ton. The college was brought to Rochester because it promised 
to be a city of large and ever-increasing importance. The col- 
lege and the city have grown apace, and the prosperity of each 
has redounded to the benefit of the other. The citizens have 
taken an active and friendly interest in the Univei^ity. It has- 
profited by the continuous, devoted and inspiring service of such 
men as William X. Sage, by the splendid donations of Gideon 
W. Burbank, Hii*am Sibley, Mortimer F. Reynolds, Don Alonzo 
"Watson, and many others no less worthy of honor. 

But the city owes an even greater debt to the college. Hun- 
dreds of Rochester boys have been given the benefits of a higher 
training, many of whom could not have obtiiined it had there 
not been a college at their doors. And we know that as time 
goes on and the college increases in strength and usefulness, 
the leaven which year by year these youths bring into the com- 
munity will prove a benefit and blessing. And in a more gen- 
eral way Rochester is thankful for the presence as citizens of 
the cultured and high-minded men, who, as president or profess- 
ors, direct the work of the University. Such men have bettored 
Rochester, and for whatever of spiritual achievement they have 
thrown into the career of this community there is no death, and 
whosoever have turned any of its citizens to the light are the 
city's benefactors and shall shine in our firmament as the stars. 



GEOEOE ALEXANDER CARNAHAN 101 

The city of tlie future will contain an ever-increasing popu- 
lation and will constitute a factor of ever-increasing importance 
in the national life. This growth is not abnormal and tempo- 
rary, but is natural and inevitable, and the end can be only 
dimly foreseen. There is no preventive. Those who seek 
one in a reaction of population toward the country will seek in 
vain. For a profound change has come over the world's in- 
dustry in this century, whereby it has ceased to be individual 
and has become organized. Before another quarter of a cen- 
tury has passed over this University, the cities of the United 
States will, by the rate of increase from 1880 to 1890, contain 
ten millions more than one-half the population. The city must 
dominate the state and the nation, and must control civilization 
and destiny. Interdependence of citizens and communities will 
increase. More complicated relations will require a more deli- 
■cate conscience and a stronger sense of justice. The question 
of the hour is, how to learn to live in cities with safety to health, 
morals and liberties. Shall the future growth of our cities be 
one of progress or one of retrogression ? 

Can the city govern itself? If not, how is it to direct the 
fortunes of the state and the nation ? How can it learn to gov- 
ern itself? Reformers are forever overhauling the structure 
and mechanism of the municipal government, and municipal 
reform has become municipal reorganization. Commissions 
are appointed, charters are drafted, and there is much discus- 
sion whether this officer should be elected and that one appoint- 
ed, what powers this board and that body should respectively 
possess. But the problem will not be solved until the city is 
given the opportunity to govern itself without being subject 
to minute legislative control. In managing its purely local 
■affairs a city ought to have, as European cities do have, all 
necessary power, indeed all power except that which is expressly 
forbidden it, instead of having limited, enumerated powers, as at 
present. In this aspect it has an individuality distinct from 
that of the state, with needs of its own distinct from the gen- 
eral needs of the state. Of course, the citizen of the city has 
some needs in common with all the citizens of the state. His 



102 THE CITY AND THE COLLEGE 

life, property and health must be protected ; he must have courts 
to settle his disputes; and his children must be educated. In 
discharging such functions the city acts as agent of the state 
and should be subject to the control of the principal. But there 
should be no chance for anyone, with sufficient power, to obtain 
from the legislature some regulation affecting the city for the 
benefit of other than city interests. 

The problem of the city of the future requires for its solu- 
tion a high citizenship, for which we must look to our educators.. 
Here is a magnificent opportunity for teachers. John Stuart 
Mill has said: ^'One person with a belief is a social power 
equal to ninety men who have only interests." Let the kinder- 
garten, the grammar school, the high school, the college, incul- 
cate the principles of an intelligent civic patriotism. If the 
scholarship of the day, in relation to public activity, falls inte 
a somnolent state, a great trust is betrayed. The educated man: 
is falsely educated, if society is not affected in any degree by 
his training. We view with intellectual satisfaction the heroie 
struggle of our fathei*s for freedom. We glorify the heroes, 
living and dead, of that later gigantic strife for the preserva- 
tion of liberty ; we thrill in an ecstacy of delight at the brilliant 
achievements in the present day of a Dewey or a Sampson;- 
we have a strenuous desire to stand up among the nations of 
the earth, determined to be second to none in the race for power 
and glory, ready to fight in season or out of season ; we uncover 
our heads to the flag of our fathers and fervently pray that it 
may ever be preserved in honor. But these manifestations 
should be but the outward trappings of patriotism. Patriotism 
must deal with common public affairs of everyday life and deal 
with them every day. Let men not dare to rely on campaigns 
of enthusiasm. As surely as the tide flows, it also ebbs. If 
the problems of the future are to be so solved as to make for 
progress, patriotism must be, not a mere impulse, but a ^xed 
principle, rooted in the heart, animating the mind, inspiring 
the life. 



The Alumni and their Alma Mater 

Hon. Jacob Sloat Fassett 

I shall not promise to be brief, because I want "mj perform- 
ance to square with my promise." I shall have to disregard 
many things which I desired to say because of the lateness of the 
hour. I wanted to speak of the significance of the last fifty 
years of our national life, and of the magnificent advances our 
country has made. It has been a bright past for America. 
But the future is still brighter. 'New opportunities con- 
stantly present themselves. The harvest is ripe for 
the reapers, but for no ordinary reapers. Our civiliza- 
tion is more complex, and it is more difficult to reach a relatively 
high plane than ever in the history of the world. The future 
needs better men than the present or past has needed ; stronger 
men, purer men, men of higher capacity, higher resolves, higher 
views and purposes. To such there stretches out a future of 
striking opportunities. In the physical world, in the mental 
world, in the social and political world, the developing prob- 
lems are such that it makes the past seem , stagnant slowness 
compared with the intense activities of to-day. 

Where are such men to be prepared? In the university. 
This brings me to speak of Alma Mater. What the mother is 
to the child, such is the university to the student, who there 
forms the habits and obtains the principles that will go with 
him through life. The university is the temple of truth. The 
chief end of the university is to teach each student to seek, to 
love, to proclaim, to defend, and, finally, to live the truth — the 
truth in every department of human interest and endeavor ; and 
also to teach him how to translate himself and his capacity into 
usefulness and service to his fellow men, and thereby to increase 
in every way his social influence. These are the high aims of 
every institution of learning. 



104 THE ALUMNI AND THEIR ALMA MATER 

Wherever I look I see splendid men, alumni of the Universitj 
of Rochester, actively engaged in the pursuits of life, in law, in 
medicine, in religion, in politics, in journalism, in mechanics, in 
the sciences, in statesmanship, in art ; each man a torch-bearer, a 
center of influence, each man passing on to others the inspiration 
which he himself acquired at Alma Mater ; the whole a regiment 
of soldiers of the truth; more than a thousand educated, cul- 
tured men, representing the University, and all exerting an in- 
fluence upon the destinies of our country and the world. An 
institution that can turn out a thousand such men as are repre- 
sented upon this platform and in this audience, after a half cen- 
tury, certainly deserves a future that will broaden her oppor- 
tunities to do good. 

The alumni speak for themselves; their work is shown by 
their deeds; but there is a class of men of whom 
something has been said, but of w^hom I should like to say 
a word more. A great tribute of praise and gratitude has been 
paid to the founders of this institution, but I speak of the noble 
men who made it possible for it to begin ; who aided it, not for 
the love of the university in the abstract but the University in 
the concrete. Just as the alumni are the flower and fruit of the 
tree, the sap of the tree is not in the founders or in the trustees ; 
it is in the corps of educators who have constituted the Faculty 
of the University of Rochester during the past fifty years. It 
is a noble list from first to last ; not only those who have gone be- 
fore, but those who remain behind. I wish I could speak of 
each one of them as he deserves. I wish my tongue could be 
touched with the fire of real eloquence as I speak for one and 
all of the men who during the last half century have given of 
their rare gifts without hoping for a rich reward in earthly 
wealth. Their kingdom is in the hearts of those they 
reached and taught, their reward in the characters of 
the men who received and represent their teaching. For 
fifty years these devoted men have been instilling into the men 
about them the very best of their life and heart and brain. 
They have never been content to stop with the class-room, they 
have followed each student beyond the portals of the University, 



JACOB SLOAT FASSETT 105 

seeking' always to impress upon them that they ought not to do 
anything to impair, or interfere with, the development of prop- 
ter manhood and a useful career. These men are a blessing to 
the University ; they have been a blessing to each alumnus who 
has been associated v/ith them in the past. Do not let us 
always hold back the meed of praise our hearts are burning to 
pour forth. While the young men are still young, and while 
the older men are still with us, let us make the teachers of the 
University of Kochester feel that we exalt them above all men, 
and appreciate what their devotion means and always has meant 
to us, their pupils and children. 



speeches at the Alumni Dinner* 

OiJR Jubilee : Kev. Henry Lyman Morehouse, D. D. 

This is a most auspicious occasion. I am itif ormed that the 
largest previous attendance at an alumni dinner was two hun- 
dred and sixty-seven, but by actual count there are at the table& 
to-day four hundred and seventy-eight. This large attendance 
is an indication of the interest of the alumni in the welfare of 
the University. Wliat a delightful reunion we have had. Yet,, 
as we have met and talked of the old days, there have come 
to us thoughts of the absent forms and faces, — loving spirits,, 
noble and true, some of whom laid down their lives in defense 
of their country on the battlefield, while others as gallantly fell 
at their posts of duty at home. 

"On Fame's eternal camping ground they rest in peace, 
While glory guards with sacred round the bivouac of the dead." 

The interest of the alumni has never been greater than to- 
day. It has been evidenced in the past, as when the alumni 
gave $25,000 for the establishment of the Anderson Alumni 
Fund. At the close of these fifty years, through the contribu- 
tions and efi'orts of the alumni, this beautiful structure has been 
reared, not only for athletic practice, but for just such func- 
tions as this. All gratitude to the men who took part in the 
erection of this building. Fellow-alumni, we were never more 
proud of our Alma Mater than to-day. Fifty years ago we were 
down in the old United States hotel. To-day we are on this- 
magnificent campus. Then we had nothing except hope and 
anticipation ; to-day we have a splendid equipment of more than 
a million and a quarter of dollars. The University was then 
an experiment : the classes were small. 'Now the alumni are a 
splendid body of men, more than a thousand in number. The 
influence of the University extends over the world from Maine 
to Manila. May it "roll from soul to soul, and grow forever 
and forever.'' 

♦The following brief extracts from the speeches at the Dinner are taken from the- 
stenographic report of the exercises. 



THE ALUMNI DINNER 107 

The University of Rochester: President-elect Eush Rhees^ 
LL.D.* 

It is difficult for me to express the regret with which I find 
that illness in my home makes it impossible for me to be in 
Rochester at this time of jubilee. I cannot conceal from my- 
self that I shall be greatly the loser in failing to meet with the 
men who represent the Rochester that is, and on whose inter- 
est and loyalty depends so largely the Rochester that is to be. 
The memories and traditions which you are recalling to-day 
have in them, to a large extent, the secret of the life of your 
Alma Mater, and any plans which do not take them into the 
calculation of the future are destined to fail of surest result. 

As I study the task which I am soon to undertake at your 
call, I grow in gratitude for the character of these traditions. 
Every new insight I obtain into the elements of that task deep- 
ens my sense of the priceless heritage Rochester possesses from 
the long and noble services of Dr. Anderson. He belonged to- 
the old type of great teachers, men who were supremely great 
in their personal influence over those they taught. If I mis- 
take nojb, Rochester can never become a rendezvous for pedants 
so long as that practical, lofty soul holds any place in our mem- 
ory and affection. There are other good inheritances from the 
more recent past. I can never be unmindful of the strong con- 
structive work that was undertaken for the institution during 
the service, of President Hill, nor can I deny myself the satis- 
faction of speaking of what is to me the remarkable work of 
Professor Lattimore and Professor Burton and their allies in 
the Faculty during the years when the administration 
of the affairs of the University has been added to their 
ordinary academic duties. I am glad that we remember to-day 
the devotion and foresight of the godly men who were instru- 
mental in planting our college in Rochester. I am equally 
glad to remember to-day the other men of catholic spirit and 
like earnestness, who, for the sake of their city and the youth 
of their neighborhood, devoted themselves and their wealth to 
the interests of the University. We shall not build well if we 

*Pre8ident Rhees's letter was read by Professor George M. Forbes. 



108 FIVE MINUTE SPEECHES AT 

do not meet them with like catholicity and generous encourage- 
ment to expect great things of us. Let me reiterate that I count 
it most auspicious that I am to enter on mv work with the 
memory of this worthy past fresh in all our minds, and to ac- 
knowledge that I have it as my firm purpose to build on the 
foundations already laid a structure worthy in some measure 
of the wisdom and the courage of the men who before me have 
put their lives and their wealth into this goodly and exalted 
enterprise. 

The Kochester Theological Seminary: President Augustus 
Hopkins Strong, D. D., LL. D. 

The Rochester Theological Seminary, like a loyal twin 
brother, congratulates the University of Rochester to-day upon 
the attainment of ripe manhood. The two institutions came 
into being at the same time, and during all the years of their 
history they have been mutually dependent. We have re- 
ceived from the University a larger number of students than 
have come to us from any other college, and they have taken 
as distinguished rank as any of those who have come from other 
colleges. Indeed, without them, we might well say that neither 
the Theological Seminary nor the denomination to which it 
belongs would occupy the place of importance and influence that 
it now fills. We honor equally with you the great and dis- 
tinguished men who have filled your chairs of instruction, and 
we earnestly cherish the hope that the new administration, wdth 
which the new half century will so soon begin shall, under the 
leadership of the man whom we have already learned to know 
and to respect and admire, reach a higher degree of prosperity 
and usefulness than has ever been reached in the past. 

The address of Dr. William T. Harris yesterday morning 
seemed to me a model of all that such an address should be; 
yet there is a remark of his, which I heard many years ago, 
which has had more influence upon me than anything which 
I heard yesterday. It was to this effect : that the tendency of 
higher education is to the training of the intellect alone, but 



THE ALUMNI DINNER 10^ 

that we need above all things to retain the essential element of 
the lower education: namely, the training of the will, the re- 
sult of which is character. I think that doctrine is correct, 
and therefore I am delighted that the institution which I ad- 
dress to-day has had for its fundamental characteristic the 
training of character as well as the development of intellect. 
Martin B. Anderson would never have consented that his bones 
be ground into mortar to cement the foundation stones of this 
institution unless it was to be an institution for the training 
of character. I rejoice in what the University has done in the 
past; I rejoice in the prospect it has before it in the future. 
If President Anderson thought it was worth his while to con- 
secrate to the University his very life, is it not worth our while 
to devote to an institution like this "our lives, our fortunes and 
our sacred honor ?" 

The Board of Trustees : Albert Hall Harris, Esq. 

Institutions, like individuals, are tested by their usefulness. 
Bigness does not always mean greatness, nor does strength al- 
ways follow size. It has always been the aim of the University 
of Rochester to make itself useful, and it has attained a very 
large measure of success. That success has been due, not only 
to the efforts of the Faculty, not only to the Trustees, but to the 
aid and succor which has been given to the institution by the 
citizens of Rochester, and others throughout the country who 
have loved it so well. It is an honor to be given a place by 
the side of the true, thoroughly useful men who have brought 
this institution to the success it has attained. It has done good 
work in the past; it is doing good work now; and we hope it 
will do even better work in the future. 

The Colleges of the Empire State: President Robert Ellis 
Jones, S. T. D. 

I do not take an attitude of apology for the colleges of the 
Empire State. The vitality of institutions of learning is gov- 



110 FIXE MIXrTE SPEECHES AT 

emed by two things: the volume of their work and the volnme 
of their resonrces. In the Atlantic states there are six large 
universities and about forty fairly strong smaller institutions 
that may be compared with them. The question of the re- 
sources of the big universities on the one hand, and the colleges 
on the other is a matter that can be accurately ascertained. I 
have studied the last report of the Commissioner of Education 
of the United States, and I had the pleasure yesterday of sub- 
mitting my results to that gentleman and receiving the assur- 
ance that they were not only approximately but absolutely cor- 
rect. My investigations show that the universities enjoy the 
sum of $58,000,000, divided between the values of library, 
apparatus, buildings and grounds, and interest-bearing funds. 
The property of the forr^' colleges is worth $62,000,000. 
The same ratio exists in the matter of income. The universi- 
ties have an income of $3,600,000, while the collies have an 
income of $4:,000,000. Institutions with this amount of 
money are stable. There is a future before them and they shall 
not disappear from the face of the earth. Furthermore, tak- 
ing the graduate list, excluding all technical and professional 
students, we find that, with practically an equal amount of 
money in the colleges and universities, the latter have but 9,000 
graduates and the colleges 20,000. I therefore maintain that 
a dollar invested in a college like the University of Rochester 
gives twice the value and does twice as much good as a dollar 
invested in any of the large universities in the United States. 

The Boaed of Regests: Hon. Pliny T. Sexton. 

I understand that it is expected of me tj>day. in my repre- 
sentative capacity, to take upon myself the character of the 
University's grandfather. I am quite well pleased to be so 
classed when I look around me and see who the grandchildren 
are ; for surely ancestral eyes were never gladdened with a more 
pleasing sight than are mine to-day. The University of Roch- 
ester has rendered great service duriag the fifty years of labor 
just closed in so successfully educating men for the highest 



THE ALUMNI DINNER 111 

duties of life, and to their Alma Mater I bring the assurance 
that jour twenty-three grandfathers are proud of its good for- 
tune, so fully realized in you. There is in connection with 
the University of Rochester a duty and an opportunity for the 
city of Rochester. The great and good men who conceived of 
this University built wisely, and it remains for you, citizens 
of Rochester, to do all possible to enable it to be what it was 
intended to be; to endow it so liberally that it shall be ready, 
at all times, to amply and fully meet the great demands of 
the future. 



The Original Faculty: Professor Albert Harrison Mixer, 
LL. D. 

It has been my great honor and pleasure to serve the Univer- 
sity of Rochester as teacher during the whole period of its ex- 
istence, save a break of eight years spent in opening and organ- 
izing the first University of Chicago, and four years passed 
in the educational institutions of Europe. I need scarcely say 
that I have a very exalted opinion of the profession which I 
have thus followed continuously for half a century. Surely 
it is inferior to no other human employment. As a prelim- 
inary preparation for his high task, the educator must have a 
clear and correct estimate of the material upon which he is to 
work. It is spirit, imperishable, and the work upon it will be 
as lasting as the material itself. First and foremost, the 
teacher must love his pupils. Love is, indeed, "the greatest 
thing in the world.'' All other agencies of civilization are but 
her servants for the uplifting of mankind. The teacher must 
1)0 the pattern and model for his pupils. He must, as far as 
possible, show in himself that high ideal of a perfect humanity 
which he would bring forth in the undeveloped beings before 
him. The teacher must be the inspiration of his pupils. In 
the work of education, inspiration means the waking up of all 
the dormant powers and animating them with a noble purpose. 
It is the business of the teacher to supply this greatest of all 
needs, the inspiration which is born of his own consecrated per- 



112 FIVE MINUTE SPEECHES AT 

sonalitj and which will impart a noble aim to the pupils imder 
his charge. 

The First Class : Eev. Andrew Longyear Freeman. 

I have been asked to tell yon of the class of '51; the best 
class that ever graduated from the University of Eochester — 
np to that time. My classmates, how well I remember theml 
George B. Brand, generous and eloquent, was the first graduate 
of the University to enter the legal profession in this city. The 
Eev. jSTathaniel J. Clark was our class giant. Wakefield G- 
Frye possessed a well-rounded character and high ability which 
called him to political positions of importance. William D. 
Iledden, one of our poets and one of the four clergymen of our 
class, served acceptably as pastor of his o^vn home church for 
twenty-five years. Henry P. Kimball taught for years and 
after that was a successful horticulturist. There comes to my 
memory to-day James E. Spencer, our Sir Galahad, whose fine 
countenance and still finer intellect made him beloved by all. 
Eobert Telford, always faithful in his studies, carried into his. 
missionary work of many years his great and good qualities. 
The oldest of the class, he was the last to go. As we look back 
they seem still with us, yet we who remain are outnumbered by 
those who have gone, for there are but three of the class liv- 
ing. Samuel W. Stanley was for a short time city attorney 
of Eockford, UL, and has since been engaged in mercantile 
pursuits. Professor Alexander A. Brooks has been president 
of three large colleges or seminaries in the State of Texas. 1 
have greatly enjoyed the privilege of being here at this time 
to see the progress Alma Mater has made in her fifty years. 
I trust that the future will be brighter far than the past, and 
the University of Eochester may long be a power for good in 
our land. 



THE ALUMNI DINNER 113 

The Anderson Memorial: Hon. Willis Seaver Faine, LL. D. 

Almost four years ago to-daj I found myself the President 
of the Alumni Association, addressing an audience something 
like the one before me. It was my intention at that time to 
start a fund for the purpose of erecting a memorial statue in 
honor of President Anderson. My remarks were then of no 
avail. The project has since taken root and has risen from the 
fanciful form of mere suggestion into general action with a 
suitable objective point. Shortly after Dr. Anderson passed 
away, a committee was formed for the purpose of soliciting sub- 
scriptions towards the erection of a statue to him and over five 
thousand dollars were subscribed. Let me say that our friend, 
Mr. Chauncey B. Woodworth, who is with us to-day, headed 
that subscription with the sum of $1,000. The statue will 
be erected. It will represent Dr. Anderson as he was, a son of 
Anak, vigorous, self-reliant and energetic. Sometimes great 
intellects are contained in feeble bodies. Such was not the case 
with Dr. Anderson. He was a majestic man, remarkably en- 
dowed, impressive in body as in mind. I^one of us older 
alumni can ever forget the effect he produced upon us when we 
were undergraduates. When the statue stands before us I 
hope upon the face of the granite pedestal will be found these 
lines, written by our fellow-alumnus, the Kev. William C. Wil- 
kinson, of the class of 1857 : 

"Ideal Christian, teacher, master man, 
Severely sweet, a gracious Puritan, 
Beyond my praise to-day, beyond their blame; 
He spurs me yet with his remembered name." 

Our Future : Ex-president David Jayne Hill, LL. D. 

I am happy to have lived to see this day and find that 
some of the seeds sown in the past have come to fruition, and 
am glad to believe that many more will bear both flower and 
fruit. But I hardly know how to speak of our future when 
such a new and disturbing feature has been introduced into 
the life of the University. I refer, of course, to the admission 
of women on equal terms with the men. Surely the women 



114 FIVE MINUTE SPEECHES 

themselves must feel that the privileges are worth the price, 
which has been so greatly reduced to meet the exigencies of 
the situation. I hope the future rnay he brighter and greater 
because of this momentous and, as I deem it now, irrevocable 
step, the outcome of which we may perhaps safely leave to that 
future from which we hope so much. Institutions are not like 
men ; they are not born to die in the short space of a generation ; 
they live on, gathering to themselves strength and power, grow- 
ing broader and more eiScient as the years go by. To what 
better end can we devote our lives than to put them into the 
upbuilding of an institution like this ? I am thankful for the 
great privilege that has been mine to put some part of my faith, 
my strength, and my poor life into this institution; and when 
I see the interest that is aroused here, and feel the contagion 
of the enthusiasm that exists in the breasts of the alumni, I 
have great faith in the future of the University of Rochester. 
Let us welcome the new president who is to come to us, and 
let us remember that, like ourselves, he is a man who needs 
cheer, who needs sympathy and love, and let us not chill him 
into a state of helplessness by lack of fellowship on the part of 
those around him. Let us make his heart warm with our wel- 
come and he will be an efficient and potent factor in building up 
our loved University. 



